Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 202

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Starting point is 00:02:46 Recording in progress. Okay, check this out. Now, I have always been amazed by when I take a second to actually tap into, like, my actual network of just friends. You know, you have friends in categories, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's just like this friend. You can call me. Work homie.

Starting point is 00:03:05 Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Like, you just don't really picture those things colliding or when like your friends, like, meet each other. It turns out they know each other. It's the weirdest thing. Anyway, for me and my like podcast, activist. you know, activism world, you know, a lot of times overlaps with the hip hop world, because, you know, we believe in a lot of same stuff. But, like, this one, like, really happened.

Starting point is 00:03:28 Yeah. Where I was just, like, in my own network, somebody I've known for a while, who I'm just now learning your name is Tristan. Yeah. I didn't know your name was Jason. Yeah, exactly. You know what I'm saying? That's how rap works. So, um, introduce yourself however you want to be introduced. Yeah, you know, and then let's get into it. Hey, everybody. I'm a tangent wiggie, aka Tristan Hacker. I got a lot of other names, too, but I'll keep it to those for now. And I'm from San Bernardino. And I'm an artist in the community with propaganda, as well as a state employee. I paid disability claims for the state of California. And in my role as a state employee, I am a union rep.

Starting point is 00:04:09 And I'm an elected member of my union's executive board. So I represent state employees from Ontario region to San Bernardino region and in between. I'm on the bargaining team, so I go up to Sacramento and help prepare for bargaining against Governor Newsom of his team as well. Word. So this is like, this is frontline energy, okay? Yeah. Which I love about it because it's like, like you said, like your day job is in some ways, it's, it's so crazy because it's like as far away as that is from the actual like worker per se,

Starting point is 00:04:41 like you have just this parisocial, like intimate relationship with everybody that works for the state because, like, you seeing, you know what they're going through and how great it is to think inside of such a here be a bureaucracy. There's somebody there that's like, no, I'm actually like fighting for y'all. Yeah, I appreciate that. Words. So first of all, tell them what the union is, which union we're talking about? Yeah. S as in Sam, E as in everybody, I as an incredible U as in union, service employees international union, but 1,000, right? So S-E-I-U is one of the biggest international unions in the world. And everyone out there has probably seen the purple, purple SCIU stuff on all kinds of stuff, from nurses to state

Starting point is 00:05:24 workers, to in-home support services workers and home care nurses. And there's a lot of different people that are under SCIU more broadly. State employees in California are SEIU 1000. So we're local 1,000. And that's the broader union that I'm a part of. All the Cali. Okay. All 100,000 state employees that are represented. Damn. Okay. And but I, uh, I, um, elected to the executive board of D.L.C. 704, which is the Inland Empire. Well, the Ontario San Bernardino part of the Inland Empire's chapter. Word. Ontario San Bernardino. Okay, this is going to be very Kelly specific. Like, obviously, this, everybody here who listens ain't from here. So, like,

Starting point is 00:06:03 I've cracked many L.A. and I.E. jokes and just, like, you know, throughout our time, you know what I'm saying? I like to say that I have an IE passport stamped. Like, I have my, Are you a Pomona guy? I worked in Pomona. See, I didn't, I never lived there. Okay, but you see what I'm saying? You have a strong connection to Pomona as far as I've seen. I've seen you, you, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:06:24 That's what I mean. Like, I'm a naturalized citizen. I got a green card. I got an I, I got an I, E. Green card. Because, like, I worked in Pomona. You know, Foundation was in Pomona. Mike and Dim Lights was in Pomona. For y'all listeners, these are like the hip hop and poetry spots that I kind of grew up in.

Starting point is 00:06:38 Because since I'm, you know, born in South Central, but I'm from the 6-U6. So you come, me coming from La Pondon. Vellenda, Pomona was just so much more closer than Limerk Park. You know what I'm saying? So I ended up just kind of like spending a lot of time there. And then for high school, I got I got bus to the Inland Empire. So I got bused. I went to school out of district because my parents split up. It's a long story. But anyway. Sure. It happens a lot. Yeah. So that being said, like I have a lot of love for the Inland Empire and spent a lot of time there. You know what I'm saying? So that's why I was like I got a visa. I got an Ie visa. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But. That being said, what would you say, I mean, it's kind of like, I'm kind of springing this one on you, but like, what would you say would be something that's like unique, a unique thing that someone from where you guys are at, like a service worker where you guys are at, there might be a unique issue that's specific to them that wouldn't be somewhere else. I'll do two because I feel like I need two to kind of answer it well.

Starting point is 00:07:40 Well, one is that the Inland Empire in Highland, which is a city, kind of a little connected city to San Bernardino, Highland has Patton State Hospital, which is basically Arkham Asylum. You know, it's basically Arkham Asylum from the Batman comics, which is it's a hospital for the criminally insane. Okay. Yeah, you know, it's like, in other words, like, you've committed crimes, but you have mental health issues. Yeah. So you're not in the regular prison, but you're not in the regular mental hospital. You are in the prison for the mental patients. Okay.

Starting point is 00:08:10 And it's a, it's a massive 24-hour facility. And I feel like, even though I work for EDD doing disability claims, because I'm in a regional chapter with the Patton State Hospital folks, they get a lot of the attention of what the union organization does because 24-hour facilities are very, very taxing and they're very right for abuse and for people to go through really difficult things. And then the second thing I would say would be the fact that where we are, we have a lot of, we service a lot, maybe more of my job, right? we service a lot of undocumented people. Like a lot of the disability claims I pay for the state, I pay to undocumented folks, which is one reason that the eye stuff has been hitting so close to home. And also people may not realize that California

Starting point is 00:08:50 doesn't regulate about documented status the way that the federal government does, right? So as long as you could prove your wages to the state of California in a legit, straight paperwork kind of way, we don't care that you're undocumented. We're going to pay you because you're a worker and you need our services.

Starting point is 00:09:04 Facts. And like, I love that you said that because when they talk about like how the undocumented and don't pay taxes. I'm like, yes, they do. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. They pay a lot. Yeah. If you can think of just off the head, like obviously over the years, the negotiations and different things that have come up and varied over time. We'll get to the ice raids because that's obviously where everything got super ratchet up. But like, what was some of the most like, I don't, like, I don't know. How would I phrase this? Where you were like, this is the most

Starting point is 00:09:32 reasonable request we can ask for. Like, this is just like, I don't, this is so, I don't understand why this is so hard for y'all. Like, this is incredibly, I just want to, like, calibrate because a lot of times people hear, they hear to wear a union, they got all these pictures about what the things are and what this, you know what I'm saying? They got all these pictures. But I'm just like, fam, you ever heard of a five-day week? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:54 Like, work week? That's unions, my G. You know what I'm saying? So, like, that seems very reasonable. You know what I mean? So if you could think of, like, some of the things you've had to negotiate, what was some of the most, like, this is, I don't understand why this is so hard for y'all. So have you ever, you probably heard the phrase, every crisis is an opportunity, right?

Starting point is 00:10:12 Yes. You've heard people say that, right? So my union and other unions have been pushing for telework, you know, my entire 20 years with the state. I'll be 17 years veteran with the state as of December, right? Wow. The entire time we wanted telework, it took the quarantine crisis of 2020, 2021 to actually get the state to agree to mass implement telework.

Starting point is 00:10:33 And so that was like, that's a crisis that we made an opportunity that's like, hey, we needed, we needed telework. So many people are also caring for their kids or also caring for their elderly people in their home, caring for a new baby or, you know, take, you know, just at the house so the contractors could come fix their plumbing. You know, it's like, like telework has been something

Starting point is 00:10:50 that we thought was very reasonable for a long time that it took until the COVID crisis for us to get telework. And we feel like we're pioneers in that, in a workforce way because now there's lots of places that have telework, partly because I think the work that unions like us have done. That's dope, man. You know, obviously coming out of the pandemic, And recently, like, a lot of companies are like, hey, you guys can come back to the office.

Starting point is 00:11:12 And people are like, absolutely not. Why, like, why would I? Hard to take it away once you got it. Yeah, yeah. Why would we do that? I know my own, like my wife, you know, she pre-pandemic at the spot she was working as she was working at a nonprofit, you know, she was like, okay, I was touring so much that she was just like, dude, like you want me in this office at a certain time.

Starting point is 00:11:35 It's stressed on the whole family. I had to get my daughter to school is, you know, just breaking her neck to figure stuff out. She's like, I'm done with the stuff that can be done at a desk within an hour. She's like, I'm just, I'm just scrolling the internet. Yeah. Like, I'm just like, like, I'm trying to tell you. You're paying for AC. You're paying for lights.

Starting point is 00:11:55 You're paying for the, you're paying for all this. There's no reason. Like, I don't have to be here, you know. Right. And so she pushed. She was just like, you know, looked up her own rights. you know, figured it out. And, you know, without telling her business, she, uh, she actually helped the staff unionized there. You know what I'm saying? She was like, look, man, it's ridiculous.

Starting point is 00:12:17 You know what I'm saying? You got a real one. Yeah, don't, don't, don't Google it. Anyway. So, yeah, so something that you had to, you know, you said, you, you, you actually, go to the state, you, you interact with Gavin Newsom, you know, which is the whole thing. Sure. We have our opinions on Mr. Newsom. Sure. You know, and like, how allied are you as an ally? Like, you know what I'm saying?

Starting point is 00:12:49 And, you know, people are complicated. We can't always agree on the same things, you know what? That's correct. There have been times where it's been like, hey, you know what? Salute. He's doing something dope. And then other times when he's not, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:01 You know what's up dope? The other times it's like, bro, who are you? Yeah. Right? What is happening right now? So obviously, you know, when you go up there, you're not interacting with him. You're interacting with his team, right? Yeah, the one time I actually met him, I went to the California Democratic Party Convention in 2012 in San Diego.

Starting point is 00:13:21 And I just went with a friend, just showed up. I was not a delegate. I was a union rep already, but I had no official role. I just showed up and walked around the San Diego Hilton, which is also where they founded San Diego Comic-Con. Yeah. And I got to meet a lot of officials, including. some inland ones, including some really famous people like Nancy Pelosi's daughter. But I went up to, I went up to, at the time, Lieutenant Governor Newsom, and basically thanked him

Starting point is 00:13:44 because he had just voted against a tuition hike for the Cal States and UCs. And I went to Cal State Semmer. You know, I have my master's in poetry, my MFA in poetry, from Cal State Semmerdino. And so I was still a student at the time, and he had just voted against a tuition increase. So there's a picture of me meeting him from that time. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:14:01 And he had just done something good. And he said humble things about it. when I thanked him for it. So my one personal interaction with him was good. But since then, in the capacity of the union, I deal with his bargaining team. Like our bargaining team deals with his bargaining team in Sacramento. Word. Okay, so give me

Starting point is 00:14:17 something that's been like... The opposite. Where what they were asking for, yeah, it was like, this is completely unreasonable, guys. Like, what do you talk about? So every three years, every three years, our state employee contract goes up, right? And so around the two-year mark, we start gearing up negotiations.

Starting point is 00:14:32 You know, and the state, Newsom has the power to summon us for negotiation, and we have the power to summon his team for negotiation. Right. So at that two-year mark, we start negotiating. So in 2022, we started negotiating about the 2023 expiring, you know, so that by the end of 23, we could have a new contract. When your state employee, it's difficult, it's hard to strike, right? Like, you have to have an extremely high threshold to strike. Like, if you're a private company in your union, it's a lot easier to strike. You guys, I want to strike you strike. Like that episode of the Simpsons and Homer became the union. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're just like, dental plan, you know,

Starting point is 00:15:03 when they started striking. Right, right. With the state, because we provide essential services to Californians in need, it is an extremely high threshold in terms of what it would take for us to legally be allowed to strike, right? And Newsom and his team know that. So they could kind of like really slow walk negotiations and stop negotiating in good faith. But as long as there's like, you know, what is it?

Starting point is 00:15:25 There's signs of life on the hospital ticker of the negotiations, then we're still obligated to not strike. Damn. Right. So in 2023, our contract expired. Newsom was offering us one or two percent raise for the next three years. And meanwhile, he was going on TV saying, I'll debate Ron DeSantis. Oh, it was during that time.

Starting point is 00:15:44 I want to help the Screen Actors Guild finish their contract and the Screenwriters Guild. And I want to, so it's like, whoa, bro, where are your kids? Why are you trying to go help their kids? Yeah. You know, it was like, why, you're not negotiating with us, but you're on TV talking about, I want to help Harrison Ford and I want to help, you know, I want to help the actors get. their contract and it's like so i something i had i made a tic talk recently about how i think my uh my lefty friends and i'm lefty as hell of course but like artist friends anti-establishment

Starting point is 00:16:12 friends you know leftist friends i think hate democrats in stupid ways whereas there are smart ways to hate democrats okay right like to me the stupid the stupid way to hate democrats is to be like oh both parties are the same i'm going to sit out and let republicans win and hurt us worse right to me the smart way to hate on democrats is to realize when they're doing a good thing here they're distracting you from a bad thing here and then they're doing a bad thing here they're distracting you know it's like good thing yeah okay right so like newsome at times might be capitulating to trump on something federally but then he does something good state domestically in the state to kind of keep his rep up or the reverse maybe he's fighting with trump on something and that's good but he's doing

Starting point is 00:16:50 some whack shit like slow walking our contract negotiations we're not hollywood actors right so when our contract goes up you didn't get the news about it like with the screen actors guild because that's slopping your hulu that's stopping your disney plus you know you You hear all about that. When our contract expires, you don't hear about it unless you're on disability, unless you're on one of our programs, and then you can't go to the office because we're under staff or because something's going wrong with us, right? Damn.

Starting point is 00:17:12 So, 2023 was a pissed off time for us because he's offering us peanuts. He was offering to help everybody else. Let me help the actors. Let me help the screenwriters. Let me fight Ron DeSantis. Let me go to Washington and have federal fights. Meanwhile, we're our contract expired. And when our contract expired, there's things we lose.

Starting point is 00:17:27 There's stipends we lose. There's benefits we lose. Yeah. And he just so he had us, had us. a bind. So I organized a work site picket at my office in San Bernardino. Let's go. In 102 degree weather, we can't strike, but we can pick it. Wow. Okay. See, I didn't know that. Right. You know, so that's part of being a union rep. It's like, what are my tools? Yeah. You know, like, what are my tools? Like, know your, know your arsenal,

Starting point is 00:17:47 know your weaponry, right? And so I organized the picket. We had signs. And I'm just, I'm gonna tear up and I think about this because I had coworkers that I didn't think we're going to march in the heat with me. I thought it might have been me by myself. You know, I was one of only one or two union reps in my office at the time now we have four because i've been recruiting you know and i have good people in my office you know um but at the time i was one of the only union reps uh there was people who i knew had logistic at the system about the union i didn't expect it but every single lunch not just my lunch at every lunch we had people picketing in front of my office with signs people were honking in support of us within a month or two we got an eight percent raise on that next negotiation let's go

Starting point is 00:18:23 you know and so you know when we fight we win when we unite we win you know like you don't you we're not fighting for nothing. And that was a do or die moment for me as a union organizer because I hadn't had many real fights yet. And I had, I couldn't really point to my coworkers and say, hey, we did this and got this. We did this and got this. So the fact that I got my coworkers to march in a hundred two degree weather with me instead of just sitting in the air condition, having lunch, and that we won that a few weeks later, they said, you're going to get an 8% raise. That's hard. You know, like, I was like, yes, like proof of concept. I have proof of concept. I'm not just wasting my co-workers' time. I could tell you there's a tangible result to

Starting point is 00:18:56 when we organized together. See, these are the type of, like, wins we need to hear because we've been, we've been taking some ills. Like, yes, sir. Speaking to L. So y'all's, y'all's S-E-I-U-1,000, you know, David Wertha, right? That's his name? Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 00:19:11 David Wirta is from one of the California S-C-I-U branches. He's tightly connected to our union, but he is not 1,000. He's not 1,000. Okay, words. But he is SEU. Yeah. So he is part of us, yeah. So when ICE, you know, invaded our streets. Yes.

Starting point is 00:19:22 He was outside, you know, doing what he had to do. I know S-E-I-U set up the thing at Alvara Street. Yeah, they set up a location there for, like, to educate. It was just such a beautiful thing. But the first thing that got me out the house was the rally for when he was detained. So, like, man, tell me what was going on. And as much as you can behind closed doors. Yes.

Starting point is 00:19:45 So most of the listeners here know this story because this show is, like, pretty tapped in. But, yeah. Right. Mm-hmm. So what I would say is this to me is an opportunity to talk about, like, the cultural differences with inland in L.A., right? Because the union is very progressive, right? But the inland is a much more conservative area, right?

Starting point is 00:20:04 And compared to Los Angeles, compared to San Francisco, compared to, you know, it's not as big of a city, it's more impoverished. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of, you know, even just the geography of it, right? People may grow up in the city. Like, my mom grew up around where you're talking about, La Puente and Monti. I was born in Almonte, right? Word.

Starting point is 00:20:21 But there was a suburban exodus in the late 80s of, like, people who wanted to go from that East L.A. 626 area to raise their kids in the inland because that was the more conservative suburb. Yeah. So for me, every time something like that happens with something like a David Werta or something in one of the bigger cities happens and we're fighting with the right wing about things, it's a matter of me educating my inland people about why we care and how we're all connected. You know, and then there's always some people, and I have to respect it as a union organizer, I really have to be able to talk with my more conservative members because there are people in the union that are not super progressive warriors like me. They're

Starting point is 00:20:53 just workers who want to be represented, right? I was going to say that's actually a good point to hammer down because, like, last year, one of the shows on our network covered a union strike at a, I want to say it was like a metal plant in Alabama, like in the sticks of Alabama. These are good old boys from the south. Sure. But one thing we can agree on me is like, pay me what I'm worth. Like, you're saying, like, it just seemed pretty simple to me.

Starting point is 00:21:19 I don't understand how you've got to be a progressive to want to be paid what you're worth, you know? So I think that that's a good point to say that, like, even in a rather conservative space, all of us want to go home and eat, you know, and earn the wages that I, that should be, pay me what I'm worth. It just, it's seen that simple. Exactly. And so, so that's a tension that happens, right? And this is probably a discussion that happens among a lot of progressive groups in general that, like, there's people who want you to focus on your, on your issue, but there's also people who recognize that we're part of an interconnected society where it's like if the immigrants are being harmed

Starting point is 00:21:53 then the laborers are being harmed if the artists are being harmed then the nurses are being harmed if the teachers are being you know so there's always that divide but in the inland which is a more conservative area there's especially that divide between people who are like

Starting point is 00:22:03 I don't want my union fighting about immigration and ice I don't want my union fighting about the environment wow I don't want the union fighting about LGBT I just want the union to fight for my race I want the union to fight for my telework and that's all I want them to do right so that's a big thing for me is to kind of explain to people how

Starting point is 00:22:19 no David Werfka fighting for immigrant rights is him fighting for you as a worker okay you know because if they came for then they could come for you you know so so that's kind of how i see that yeah did you feel like it landed well uh it always does does with some and it doesn't with some you know i'll be honest with you there are people who just left the union after the charlie kirk killing oh wow in my opinion they're going to really weird logic jumps when they're like well the union endorsed kamala and kamala has supporters that are happy about charlie kirk dine so i'm living the union yeah i'm like uh and so you don't want that raise? You really red string in that joint. You know? That is definitely the

Starting point is 00:22:55 Allway Sunny and Philadelphia meme of just you like tie these strings together. Like, bro, I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. Right. And so to be honest, there's been some of that. You know, I'll say this. The Charlie Kirk gave us more of that than the immigration stuff. But, but there's always those few whispers from a few people who are like, they're just not down with the broader. Yeah. Cause. Those of us who are in the leadership of the union, I think we have solidarity. You know, we have solidarity. You know, we have solidarity, not just with other state workers, but with anyone who's in any SCIU, but with Teamsters, with anyone who's in any union. And with Californians, anyone who is somebody who is in a

Starting point is 00:23:26 vulnerable group. Yeah. You know, and so there's just always that difference of the opinion. I would say over, let's say it's 60% hits in a good way. And in my area, because it's so conservative, let's say 40% it doesn't. You know, it's something we work on. That's interesting. Okay, my last two questions would be this. Sure. I'll give them both. So what are y'all currently kind of like pushing for? I'm assuming it has a lot to do with immigration and ice raids and stuff.

Starting point is 00:23:59 But also in what ways can we as just a broader community help? Well, how do I put this? So I work in downtown San Bernardino. Okay. And my disability office is next to the Mexican consulate. Let's go. First of all, we need to paint a picture of San Bernardino. I really feel like...

Starting point is 00:24:16 Yeah. For those that don't know California, the nature of what San Bernardino is, is a part of this story that you might be missing. First of all, like, okay, all that you picture, everything that everybody else pictures around what you thought Compton was in the 90s, all the pictures that you think, you know what I'm saying,

Starting point is 00:24:37 that you go, oh, it's really San Bernardino. Like, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, so, I mean, I'm trying to say this in a way that's descriptive and not derogatory, because obviously, like, it's always Cali love for me and I, you know, of course. But there is a certain, there's a certain part of San Bernardino

Starting point is 00:24:55 that feels like, like, just a spirit of like, we just gave up. The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead, that's exactly it. It feels like a zombie land, like just this dark, I remember the Carousel Mall, like, you walk by that mall. It's eerie. It just feels like when people talk about the forgotten man,

Starting point is 00:25:13 the forgotten America, I'm like, San Bernardino. Yeah. Like, we didn't gave up on that city, yeah. It's recently gone from 230,000 people to only 200,000 people. But also probably because a lot of people that left were the most impoverished people, our poverty rate went from, let's say, in the post-Bush 2 recession, like 2010, we had a 30% poverty rate. We were the most impoverished city in the state.

Starting point is 00:25:34 We've gotten down to like 17% poverty, which is still bad. Yeah. You know, that's still almost one out of five people. What was it? It's very diverse. And someone who pays attention to politics, it has all the problem, Exactly like you said, all the problems that people talk about when they say the important problems. It's post-industrial.

Starting point is 00:25:49 There's gun violence. It's diverse. There's poverty. You know, there's environmental issues because it's such a warehouse empire. Yeah. Because it's such a, you know, area of freight and warehouses. It's like the air quality is some of the worst in the state.

Starting point is 00:26:00 Yeah. You know, we have real problems. You know, we got real problems. And in downtown, downtown San Bernardino is a lot of where the problems are. We want to get it like downtown Redlands and downtown Riverside and some of the other nicer downtowns, but it's just not there yet. And there are people absolutely working on that. And, like, there are a couple alleyways in the city. It sounds so, it sounds so humble, but we have a couple alleyways in the city that got

Starting point is 00:26:20 $500,000 grants recently to kind of make them an arcs alleyway to kind of look like something more like the Claremont Village. Let's go. You know? And so, yeah, you know, and so we are always working on it. And I will always, you know, as somebody who founded, co-founded the Inland Empire Music Award show and other platforms that I put on, not just my art, but I help put on other artists in the inland. I will always tell you about the amazing tacos you could get in my city, the amazing

Starting point is 00:26:41 small businesses you can support my city. the amazing art community put on by my OGs like Judah 1 of Pomona like Noah James of the Inland and Lisa Jay and many others who helped build a really beautiful ecosystem like there's

Starting point is 00:26:55 please come to Samara and hit me up and I'll take you to save beautiful parts of it you know but yes it's rough to your point I know I want you to get to the next thing but to your point that was the same as that picture of content

Starting point is 00:27:05 to where it's like yes like in the sense that like we know it's dangerous we know there's poverty we know there's that but there's beauty here stuff, you know, and let me come, like, and again, like, just the hood rules where it's like, well, you with me. Like, so you're good, you know what I'm saying? Like, you know, and some

Starting point is 00:27:23 of the, yeah, like, we can, we can definitely shine lights, like I said, like, you know, I've talked about Noah James on this show, you know what I'm saying, I've talked about Judea 1, you know, I talked about sincere, C4, like, the people that, like, I came, I came up with, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, the Inland Empire, a lot of the stuff that the nation attributes to L.A. is really i.e. You know what I'm saying? Yes, sir. And we know, like we know,

Starting point is 00:27:47 because they're not lying about it. We know that matter of fact, nobody has pride about, I.E. got pride, boy. They're like, no, no, no, no. We are to inland. And I love that about y'all. Anyway, I'm wearing my Jaden Daniels.

Starting point is 00:27:58 See, check it out. Yup, yep, yep, yep. You know? Yeah. Because the I.E. got a Heism. The I.E. got a highsman. So yeah. Okay. So anyway, so your office is next to the Mexican consulate.

Starting point is 00:28:07 Mexican consulate, right? And so I've actually spent my, you know, I've been at this office in Samaradino since 2014, and for five years before that, I worked in the Riverside office. But I've been in my office in Shamarino, 2014, and I have gone to so many, I've infiltrated so many right-wing protests

Starting point is 00:28:23 that are in front of the Mexican consulate. Yes. And like, so I'll go hang out with them. And like, oh, what are you guys doing? And then I'll, like, take their markers. I'll take their posters. And I'll just kind of be like, oh, yeah, maybe you have a point there.

Starting point is 00:28:33 And then I'm like, I'm in my office. And then my secretary is, you know, the secretary of my office is like, oh, where do you get these markers? Like, I got you some markers. because it's like, you know, and so I'll infiltrate right week protest, but, but on the flip side, lately, you know, ICE knows they could come to my corner. And my corner in downtown has the Chase Bank, the Wells Fargo Bank, the Mexican consulate, the disability office, the old city

Starting point is 00:28:54 hall building. Like, it's like the hub, it's one of the downtown hubs of the city. And ICE has been coming and snatching people up, uh, in front of my office. Uh, it happened, it's happened twice at least, uh, in the last month. And one of the days that it happened, I was in the office. I called my congressman. I called the, the mayor, I got all the local authorities involved. By the end of the day, the horse-mounted unit of my city's police was like patrolling to make sure ICE wasn't messing with us. Wow. And I tell you, homie, what a weird place this is. I've never been so happy to see the regular cops. Right, right, right. What is this timeline? What are you doing to me?

Starting point is 00:29:26 Yeah. What are you doing to me? We're like, I'm in 7-11 at 6 in the morning getting my coffee and I see regular cops. I'm like, thank you, sir, for at least showing a warrant. Yeah, yeah, When you arrest me, you know, because ICE is doing none of that, none of it. None of it. None of that. They're not doing warrants. They took, I don't want to cry. They pushed a wife out of the way. She's like, what are you doing? They took the husband, tossed him in a van and drove off. It all happened so fast that no one was able to film it. Damn. No, in this era, no one was able to film it. And they know that how they're doing it that fast, right? That's the trick. Yeah. That's the trick. That's what we've been telling. Like, a lot of people have asked me, just friends from out of town, like, dude, has it has it toned down? And I was. like, no, it just went underground. It's like they just, they're a lot more sneaky now.

Starting point is 00:30:11 Like, it's not this big display of power. It's more the sniper guerrilla warfare to where, like you said, you just getting your gas, like, you're out of pumping gas. And then somebody just, and it's so fast I can't film it. You know what I'm saying? Yes. And the hard part for me is like, it's to your point to where it's like,

Starting point is 00:30:28 since you're not identifying yourself, like, you might not even be an ice agent. And that's a thing that happened. That's a thing that there are people who impersonate law enforcement officers and go harass people just on a racist basis. Yeah. You know, and, and it's arguable that the Trump administration is empowering people like that.

Starting point is 00:30:45 Man. Yeah, so, so yeah, it absolutely is happening. To be honest, my union, we're going to always support the actions that are fighting back against it, but the, but the only things that we really have jurisdiction to actually fight is, is our, is the labor-related stuff. Yeah. And so, you know, we actually just got telework extended in exchange for delaying our raise, you know, because the state's really broke right now for a lot of reasons. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:31:10 We delayed for two years a raise that we were about to get in July. So we're already a couple months past, not having that raise. But in exchange, we got our telework agreement extended for two years. So what I would tell people who want to get involved is like, if you are in a workplace that has a union, get involved, you know? Or if you had someone in your life like me who does union stuff outside of work, next time they invite you to a phone bank or next time they invite you to an event, go support. Because we're absolutely, we were at the No King. protests. We're at the anti-ice protest. Like, we're in the unofficial capacity. We're going to, we're going to do all those kind of things to support the broader community. And, and even

Starting point is 00:31:44 though it's my union, for example, on Wednesdays, we have a lot of our meetings, we're doing phone banking for Prop 50, right, which is the whole redistricting thing, which gives us the power to take some seats away from the Republicans. I know there's a lot of, there's a debate to be had there. But ultimately, it's us trying to keep some power away from the right wing. And you don't have to be in my union to go to those phone banks. If you want a phone bank to help Prop 50 pass so we could take some Republican seats away from the Federal House of Representatives, hit me up, hit up anybody in, you know, in the Inland Empire chapter of SCIU, and we can bring you to a phone bank in Ontario and we'll get pizza or barbecue or whatever, and we could phone bank against

Starting point is 00:32:17 these dang Republicans, you know? Yeah, man. Man, tangent. I appreciate this, man. I appreciate you, man. I've wanted you to have me on. I love your show. And I love you, man.

Starting point is 00:32:26 I think you're such a cool dude. I think you're wise. I think that you're engaged in a community in a cool way. Your artists, I respect a lot. And not just me. I mean, friends, like, sincere. Explain to me why you're significant to them and why you're an influence and stuff like that. So I appreciate even being on your radar, brother.

Starting point is 00:32:41 Man, stop it. Stop it some more. I'm just kidding. My wife says that. Okay, so perfect. Well, then tell us how people need to hear your music, how they can get in touch with you, how they can follow you. Give me all the links. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:54 So T-A-N-J-I-N-T is tangent. You know, you could find me on everything on Twitter, Instagram, you know, Facebook. What was it? The Inland Empire Music Award Show that I'm a co-director and co-founder of is at It's Onlyempire.com. That's a ITS-onlyempire.com. And also, I want to encourage Inland Empire artists, you know, you still have from now to the end of September to submit to the award show. And we've been doing it for three years. We partnered with nonprofits and businesses.

Starting point is 00:33:22 We throw a dope-ass. It's pretty dope. Yeah. You know, award show at a little art center in downtown San Bernardino at the Garcia Center for the arts. Or we give away real trophies and real awards. and we have red carpet media and performances. It's like the Grammys for the Inland Empire. So, you know, please get involved in It's Only Empire.com.

Starting point is 00:33:39 That's Only Empire Now. Fam Likely is my group with Diesel. We got a new album out. That's like scam likely on your phone, but fam likely because it's likely that your fan is hitting you up. Fan likely West Coast Avengers is my first group, the more nerdcore inland empire stuff. And we got an album that came out just under a year ago now, the harvest. So I'm everywhere. You can catch everything.

Starting point is 00:33:58 All over the place. Yeah. Tangit. Thank you so much, my brother. Hey, thank you, man. Much love. There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it.

Starting point is 00:34:25 Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been. consumed. You know how waking up from a dream? A familiar place can look completely alien? Get back, everyone. He's going to next.

Starting point is 00:34:42 And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him. Burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild

Starting point is 00:34:57 from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The devil walks in Aberstown. But the humility in knowing that life is this classroom

Starting point is 00:35:20 that we should never graduate for is what is going to keep you growing. And that's all that matters. World Mental Health Day is around the corner. And on my podcast, just here. with Dr. Jay, I dive into what it really means to care for your mind, body, and spirit. From breaking generational patterns to building emotional capacity, healing is a journey, and wholeness is the destination. I'm going to walk away feeling very healed and feeling like, yes, I'm going to continue my healing journey and I'm going to get some keys from you.

Starting point is 00:35:58 Listen to just healed with Dr. Jay from the Black Effect. Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay, and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club. The new podcast from Hello Sunshine and IHeart Podcasts, where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off each week i'm joined by authors celebs book talk stars and more for

Starting point is 00:36:38 conversations that will make you laugh cry and add way too many books to your tbr pile listen to bookmarked by reese's book club on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast apple books is the official audio book and ebook home for reese's book club visit apple dot co forward slash reese apple books to find out more In early 1988, federal agents raced to track down the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia. We had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it. But what they find is not what they expected. Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin.

Starting point is 00:37:26 They go, is this your daughter? I said yes. They go, oh, you may not see her for like... 25 years. Caught between a federal investigation and the violent gang who recruited them, the women must decide who they're willing to protect and who they dare to betray. Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand,

Starting point is 00:37:49 and I saw the flash of light. Listen to the Chinatown Sting on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts. Welcome to Itchadhafen here, a podcast about why everything feels absolutely awful and also deeply unhinged. I am your host, Viag, and oh boy, thing feel bad. I don't know, this is my most, this is my most Robert S. Kinsured out in a while with me to talk about why everything sort of feels like this and the disconnect between the fact that, like everyone actually hates Trump and the way that's being not covered and reflected in

Starting point is 00:38:39 everything that you interact with is Vicki Osterweil, who is a writer and editor at the Collective Journal Call, doer of many things, agitator. I'm very busy. I think it says bricklayer on the thing. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, who also has a new book called The Extended Universe out April 14th. of next year that is about the way that Disney sort of took over the world through the deployment expansion and usage of the violence of the copyright regime, a thing that

Starting point is 00:39:11 is suddenly very relevant again in our weird Jimmy Kimmel hours. So we'll be talking some more about that and about Disney's long history of fascist bullshit towards the end of the show. Exactly, yeah. Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Mia, thanks. And yeah, we are all Jimmy's Kimmel, you know, in this moment, I think. Oh, no, Jimmy's kibble. Shout out to where I posted that. I love you. Okay, so I think the other place I wanted to start is with this, like, question of, like, why does it feel like this?

Starting point is 00:39:49 Yeah. And I think part of the reason it feels like that is that Trump's approval rating is really low. Like, people don't actually like him. It's like 41. His proof of rating is 41%. It's down, like, a point. point in September, even with all the Charlie Kirk stuff, it's still down. Yep.

Starting point is 00:40:05 His most popular policies is immigration policy, which is terrifying, but his most popular policy is pulling at 42%. So no one actually likes him or anything that he does, right? And like 41% is still like a lot of people, but it's not the majority of the country. Yeah. Notably, like, by how math works. Yeah, exactly, yeah. There's been a few things I think are interesting about this.

Starting point is 00:40:30 There are, there are signs. that this is actually really, really, there's something substantive happening here. One of them was a special election that I think people who paid attention to for about two days and then forgot about, which was a special election in Iowa, which, like, prevented the GOP from getting a two-thirds supermajority in the state legislature. And the Democrats somehow miraculously, even though the Democrats are hideously unpopular, they won a special election in a district in western Iowa

Starting point is 00:41:02 that was plus 11 for Trump this year and this is not like a like this is a district that is like just Sioux City or something or like this is a this is a gerrymandered as district that is like a little bit of Sioux City and then stretched out all the way into a bunch of rural areas to like diffuse the vote

Starting point is 00:41:19 they won this district by 11 like last year they lost this election by 11 points in Western Iowa Yeah Unhinged They're doing like all the election's like this Like it's it's

Starting point is 00:41:34 It's being ridiculous Like and again this is like This is again like voting for people Who are like not popular But it's like literally any alternative People are like holy shit Western Iowa Is like no fuck this

Starting point is 00:41:47 This fucking sucks ass Like it's Yeah I think that you know I've been following a bit Is that farmers are freaking out Yeah. Soybean crops and corn crops are going to be rotting in the fields. You know, I think soybean, soy in particular, something like 50% of the U.S. soy crop is traditionally

Starting point is 00:42:05 exported, and by traditionally, I mean, every year exported to China. This year, China is not buying any American soybeans. Yep. So literally half of the market is going to die. And I don't know, you know, sometimes these numbers don't really do justice. If half of an economy collapses, that's the whole economy collapsing. That's not like, oh, yeah, they just like, took a, you know, a haircut. Like, that's massive. Yeah. American farmers are like the most bailed out class of people who are not like major corporations in the entire world. And it's

Starting point is 00:42:36 not working. Like they keep, they keep being like, oh, it's okay, well, just like give you a bunch of money. And it's not enough because China has decided not to buy any of this soybean crop. But it's like, okay. And this is something we talked about like at the beginning of the administration, which is that like, this administration has been going through and systematically alienating every single part of the coalition? Yeah. They're pissing off, like, the farmers, they're pissing off, like, the major pharmaceutical companies, they're pissing off

Starting point is 00:43:02 the military, they're pissing off a whole bunch of the parts of the government bureaucracy. Like, they've kind of stripped the FBI to the bones over, like, homie stuff that they're still mad about. And then the guy they put in charge of it is just, like, completely incompetence. And it's like, okay,

Starting point is 00:43:19 there's only so long you can sort of go, like, systematically alienating every part of your coalition, just, like, basically attempting to drop a bomb on the economy every single week and sometimes it drops and sometimes it doesn't. Yeah, exactly. I think there's actually an interesting sort of parallel here with tech stocks and with like the economy in general that has been sort of, you know, on the ground for most of us has felt like it's been in recession since 2020, right? You know, of different sizes and localities, but it's felt bad for a while. Now it's really bad. No one can get a job.

Starting point is 00:43:50 Yep. Right. Like things are really like prices are going up, up, up. Everyone feels bad. and yet the stock market is still achieving highs. And I think there's sort of a generalized equivalent strategy of, like, make it look like things are normal and good, and, like, that will actually support things materially. And, like, I mean, maybe it will forever. Maybe the bottom will never fall out. I don't know. I don't think that's, I think that's a bad bet, but like, okay.

Starting point is 00:44:18 Yeah, well, but I think the interesting part of this, too, is if you look at what's going on with the economy. And it's also worth noting, right, like, the economy nominally in sort of econometric terms looks fine. You're not fine, but it looks sort of okay, right? The stock market is still growing. There's technically like economic growth. But comma, we both sold this chart a couple of weeks ago. That is the most unhinged thing I've ever seen in my entire life, which is there is a GDP chart by a JP Morgan analyst, which shows that tech in the the last like year roughly and like in the last um sort of like short term window it's been 35 to 45 percent of all us GDP growth yeah and what i say tech by the way like to be clear

Starting point is 00:45:08 about this it is technically a composite of like all the sector right but like it's basically just the like the top like the the five big tech companies right yep it's like apple it's Microsoft. But basically, and this is the one that's like unhinged right now, is that like the most valuable company in the world is in Vidia, a company that makes graphics cards. Yep, yep. And this is all, because this is all of this GDP growth, quote on quote, is AI boom stuff, right? It's like massive fixed capital investments. Sure, it's like, yeah, there's like incredible fixed capital investments, but the fixed capital investments are just we're building a diesel powered AI data center somewhere in Tennessee that is going to poison the

Starting point is 00:45:50 entire population for no benefits. Yeah. And it's like all of these companies like have gone just completely totally all in on AI. I think it doesn't make any money, can't make anybody, and structurally will not make any money. And this is like a third of like the growth of the economy. We are actually living through the famous old tweet, the drill, is it drill about the candles? Someone help fix my economy? Yeah, yeah. We're living in the candles tweet. The whole economy is candles. Yeah. And this is something that our colleague at Zichron argues that there is not enough money in the world to just continuously bail these companies out?

Starting point is 00:46:24 Yeah. Like, there just isn't, right? The cash flow of these companies is like they've managed to achieve a cash flow rate that like can't be replaced by government contracts, which is just unbelievable. And I think this is one of the disconnect things, right? Because like, it's interesting, you're starting to see a little bit of stuff crop up from like local level politicians where every once in a while you get them be like, oh yeah, no, it is like a recession economy like on the ground.

Starting point is 00:46:49 in like Wisconsin, but I feel like in the media, and this is one of the things that I think makes everything insane, it's not being treated that way. Yeah, no, and I think, you know, you went exactly where, you know, we talked about going, but we were going to go, which is that, like, part of what is so crazy making about this current moment is precisely that disconnect

Starting point is 00:47:09 between sort of the on-the-ground experience that everyone's been having for years now, but is, like, especially intense. And, like, the fact that, like, AI is very, obviously not interesting or good and no one likes it. And like, even the people who sort of are, I think mostly in good faith, like trying to take it seriously and who are like, yeah, it's going to change everything. Like, you know, like normie people in work stuff, like they don't really use it very much.

Starting point is 00:47:36 Or if they do use it, like it's not effective. There wasn't a campaign to force everyone to buy smartphones when the iPhone happened. Everyone wanted one because it was like obvious what it did for you. No, you know, obviously whatever. This is not a defense of. the smartphone. But, like, there is this broad recognition that that is nonsense, right? That, like, the AI economy is nonsense, that, like, the economy that everyone says is doing fine feels bad. And this has been going on since, you know, Biden campaigned on, you know, oh, it's just a

Starting point is 00:48:05 vibe session. The, you know, the economy is fine. And, like, the economy wasn't fine. No. One of the charts I really am obsessed with is a chart from, like, Bloomberg, which is, like, small business owner confidence from like 2010 to 2025 and like if you look like from 2016 to 2020 which is the first Trump term it goes up like 500% right it just goes up it just is huge it's the highest it's been by huge margin and it just drops again in 2020 so it finally made me understand why so many libs were like so committed to the vibe

Starting point is 00:48:39 session analysis because there was a massive vibe inflation under the first Trump administration so the reason people felt like the economy was good was because small business owners, and this is the classic analysis of fascists, right? It's the petty bourgeois, the small business. They were like, this is the best times you've ever lived through based on no evidence. And if you work for a business and your boss is like, things are booming. We're doing great. You know, if you don't run the numbers, you're likely to believe it. You know, like if everyone around you was saying that, like, there's no reason to doubt it unless, I mean, you know, you don't really believe your boss a lot of the time, but you know what I'm

Starting point is 00:49:09 saying. Like, it just, it has an effect of making everyone feel like things are better. that chart started to creep up again after Trump's election November 2024 before Liberation Day but on the announcement of the Liberation Day tariffs tanks so that's gone

Starting point is 00:49:23 yeah it's gone yep and I think that's a really vital sort of component of what's happening is like you know we talk a lot about how so there's sort of these like self-contained like reality tunnels that people are gone down but it's also really diffused by class

Starting point is 00:49:39 yes yes and this ties back to the AI stuff for example where it's like if you are in the tech sector, AI is kind of useful because the one thing you can sort of kind of do decently well is program. And if you're in this sort of like world, which is again, enormous portions of all of the economic growth, right, that is happening is coming out of these places and it's like, oh, this really does look like the, like the future is here if you've, you suddenly have this machine that can do your job for you.

Starting point is 00:50:07 And it's like, well, maybe coding was just wasn't that hard to begin with maybe. But like, you know, I say this is someone who learned a code and hated it. But like, you know, but like it creates these sort of like self-reinforced like reality tunnels. But the thing about the reality tunnels is like every once in a while like the actual world comes in like a giant fucking arrow and punctures it. And that's what happened to those small business people was they were like, oh shit, what do you mean they got rid of the de minimis succession? What do you mean they're putting all these tariffs up? What do you mean they're like just straight up taking a sledgehammer to the entire logistic system that have been, like, that's the basis of, like, most Americans small businesses are, like,

Starting point is 00:50:45 are shipping businesses, right? Like, or they're either directly shipping businesses, or they rely on, on cheap imports from a whole bunch of different countries. And this just even goes into, like, the Gryft economy, right? Like, massive portions of the Gryft economy are just like, yeah, like, drop-shifting. Yeah, like, supplements, stacks. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like, you know, it's another reality tunnel, Mia. Oh, these products and services, damn it, that was a better one than I was going to do, I was going to do, you know what else is a scam, but these products and services that support this podcast

Starting point is 00:51:16 We are so back We have never been more back I want to kind of also talk about what's been happening structurally with the media as this has been going on which is that Trump and his party has staged a pretty successful full takeover of a lot of it.

Starting point is 00:51:43 You know, you had, I mean, Elon Musk obviously buying X, but like they're in the process of taking over CBS, basically by using the fact the quote-unquote free media is actually capitalist media and you can just buy them out and bully them by threatening them with losing money. You can, in fact, just completely get them to fall in line or have your own rich backers just buy it. And I think this is sort of fueling the disconnect, right? There was also this post-2020, all of like the senior management level of all of the newspapers kind of lost their minds in 2020 because their staff was like, no, we don't want to print

Starting point is 00:52:18 Tom Cotton calling for the U.S. Army to be deployed against protesters. And these people were like, okay, fuck it. We're just like, you know, you can see it's like the Washington Post. They were like, yeah, we will literally rather burn the post than have that happen again. And the post obviously is like under the control of Jeff Bezos, who was a, style war Trump ally and I think

Starting point is 00:52:38 this has been contributing to it because like they've been able to take over social media platforms and they've been

Starting point is 00:52:43 able to take over the sort of corporate like bourgeois media and it's created this incredible

Starting point is 00:52:50 unreality of this image that he is like this like staggeringly popular leader and that the things he do are popular

Starting point is 00:52:57 and that there's been like a giant cultural shift towards his stuff and it's like well I mean there kind of has been a cultural

Starting point is 00:53:02 shift in terms of like you know elite liberals are allowed be racist again. Fuck. Which, you know, it's like all of the people who always wanted to be eugenicists are like, you know, on that shit now.

Starting point is 00:53:17 And they, you know, they crack their knuckles and warmed up under COVID, right? Like, this is also contiguous in a way. Yeah. But yeah, no, I think that that's exactly right. And I think part of what we saw in the last week, I mean, I know we were going to talk about this a bit that, like, the last week when we're recording this, which was the week of the Charlie Kirk memorializing when everyone pretended that. Ventilating a Nazi was like the greatest tragedy that had befallen American heroes.

Starting point is 00:53:39 And I saw a lot of people who had been up until then relatively level-headed suddenly really start to panic that week and feel like things were really. And I think part of that was because with a man as absolutely riseless and as obviously malicious and uninteresting as Charlie Kirk getting that treatment like he was, you know, Robert Redford or whatever he also passed. I think that happening in unison across all the media. I think people finally realized, like, oh, everything is totally captured. And the people who hadn't really thought that felt like that there was sort of this unanimity. The unanimity you're talking about because they're able to project this unanimity through this one sort of media voice. And like the fact that that was punctured by Jimmy Kimmel getting fired and they're being like a genuine upswell of popular attention about the man show guy, like who hasn't been funny like probably since he was 14 or whatever. I think a lot of people have focused on that as being extremely embarrassing and cringe, which is like, yeah, accurate.

Starting point is 00:54:39 But I think, like, also, like, they couldn't even hold it together for a week, right? Like, they couldn't even hold this full court press together for a week. They had that Charlie Kirk documentary. They were like, we're going to film it on, you know, on Sinclair, all the places where we would be showing Jimmy Kimmel. And they just canceled it. They put it on YouTube. Yeah, 26,000 views. This means, I am very, very proud of this.

Starting point is 00:54:59 More people listen to me complaining about the way that everything everywhere all. at once was spreading the bourgeois patriarchal ideology of the family, more people listen to me talk about that on this show than watch the stupid fucking Charlie Garg Memorial. Sorry to that man, but people

Starting point is 00:55:19 do not care. People don't care about that guy. And it didn't, and also as you said at the opening, his polls have gone down. People are like, shut up about this. Like, they don't care. It doesn't work. And like, polls aren't everything.

Starting point is 00:55:31 But like, I think this disconnect that's so hard is that if you are mostly getting your information from a media environment, which all of us do, like that's how most of us get all of our information. This is not a judgment. It feels like everyone is at like half-mast, you know, for their beautiful boy.

Starting point is 00:55:50 Look what they did to my beautiful boy with his tiny little face and his huge neck that like apparently was made of steel and caught bullets. Like a Fox News article said that he was like particularly strong-bodied and he kept he saved other people. Okay. I didn't talk about this for a second Because this is so fucking a hitch

Starting point is 00:56:07 Okay, so his like Surgeon or whatever Was like, oh yeah He was, he started His surgeon wrote a thing about like this bone That doesn't exist in the neck That he was like, oh yeah He had this really thick bone there

Starting point is 00:56:19 That stopped the bullet And this got like picked up by like Fox News Who's out running a story About this magical iron bone In Charlie Kirk's neck That like God put there or something to save I just It's so

Starting point is 00:56:36 Yeah, I can read the headline for you. Hang on, I've got it here. Oh, God. So this is Fox News on X. There's a picture of Charlie Kirk. It says, Surgeon says Charlie Kirk's body stopped a bullet in, quote, absolute miracle

Starting point is 00:56:47 that saved others, TPSA says. And then, quote, Man of Steel, Charlie Kirk's body stopped a bullet that would typically, quote, just go through everything. And it was, quote, an absolute miracle nobody else was killed. His surgeon told Turning Point USA.

Starting point is 00:57:00 So that's weird behavior. that people don't like. That's not, yeah. No. So I think, like, basically, they have this capacity to do this, like, really, really intense,

Starting point is 00:57:12 unified message across the entire spectrum of the media. And we're seeing it again right now with, like, NPR, publishing basically does Tylenol actually cause autism? So the science isn't out yet, you know, or whatever, like, as their headline, you know?

Starting point is 00:57:25 Yeah. So, like, obviously, like, that's scary if you're used to a reality, which is shaped largely by the media. and Trump has gotten into office twice based on a media reality-shaping effect. The media has been the main tool, both social and mainstream,

Starting point is 00:57:41 for putting him into power. So it's understandable to take it seriously because it does need to be taken seriously. But there's other stuff going on. Well, and like the funniest version of this was just how fast Disney caved on bringing Jimmy Kimball back. Yes.

Starting point is 00:57:59 Which was like sub one week. Yeah, no, it was sub one week. And, you know, to me, that says that actually the boycott spread real fast and real far. Yeah. Like, there was a Disney adult on TikTok, right, who was sort of, like, giving people instructions on how to cancel their Disney World vacations and was, like, canceling his Disney World wedding. You know, and like, this was, like, all happening really, really fast. People were really mad. And, you know, yeah, it's, again, it's goofy that it's over Jimmy Kimmel, but it's not really about Jimmy Kimmel, right?

Starting point is 00:58:28 It's because everyone hates this man. They hate this. Yeah. And people don't actually want this stupid shit to just literally, and, you know, and he's trying to do this again, right? He's apparently trying to sue Disney. Like, they don't want the fucking orange guy to be able to just straight up say what is legal to say on TV, which is the thing that he is attempting to do right now.

Starting point is 00:58:50 And the other thing about it that I think is really important and relevant is that a better dictatorship doesn't go to the press and fire this man. they pull strings behind the scenes. They get him to retract on his show in a way that causes no attention and the people who follow Kimmel see it enough to understand that power has been pulled behind the strings

Starting point is 00:59:12 but they probably don't really think much about it. That is how like real, really smooth repression of a free press into a bot press involves a lot of strings being pulled behind the scenes. And in fact, it has been happening for 20 years in America. There has been a lot of that going on. Part of what's so obscene about this whole situation in a certain way is that Trump just needs to do less. Things have been set up for fascism for a while.

Starting point is 00:59:39 He just needs to do less, and he can't help himself. They can't help themselves because they're, you know, because they need it to be in this sort of public mode. And also he's lost his, you know, his juice. Yeah, yeah. And it's also just like, I mean, this is also partially, Trump is just like pathologically obsessed with late night comedy. Right. because he's a good TV guy and so he's just mad

Starting point is 01:00:00 on his red and mad and nude online except like the previous version of it where like you were just like throwing shit at your television set in like 195 which is a really terrified thing to have in the presidency but you know speaking of having things in the presidency

Starting point is 01:00:16 these products and services look if they pay me more you get better transitions but they don't so vote for them We are back So, you know, I think it's worth noting that like, yeah, no, like the immediate financial pressure of, you know, just the collision of, wait, hold on, like the people who buy things, which is most people, and admittedly, like Disney adults are a very nice. narrow subset of people, but like the speed and rapidity of which reality, which is people don't like this guy, hit the like sort of, you know, just like sort of smashed through this like tunnel

Starting point is 01:01:07 of the Charlie Kirk stuff was just unbelievable. And like part of this, this is something that Marissa Cobbos from the handbasket reported, which is that part of what was going on was Disney was about to roll out a price increase. Yeah. And so they had to bring it back so they could do their price increase, which brother, just delay the price increase. If we're trying to do authoritarian, whatever. Okay. You know, I am happy these people

Starting point is 01:01:30 suck at doing this. It's great. We like it. We like that they're bad at it. Right. Yeah. You know, like Disney is being pressured here, but I think it's worth talking about something that you have been spending a ungodly amount of time in the minds of.

Starting point is 01:01:46 Yeah. Which is Disney and fascism. Oh, boy. Yay. Yeah, I mean, part of what's been so funny about this week for me personally, and that's what really matters, obviously, is that, is that, is that like, you know, when we went into this administration, we started seeing what they were doing, I was like, I can't believe I'm writing a book about free trade and lawfare, right? Like warfare by law, like, you know, like sort of this, this massive corporate legal apparatus that has been supported by global trade regimes because they're ripping it apart, right? Like, like, the pharma tariffs is like a huge blow. load, the IP regime. Sorry, the intellectual property regime, the IP regime is what I analyze in the book I've just written and is coming out in April. And it's about how Disney really was like a sort of pioneer in understanding the value of intellectual property and

Starting point is 01:02:35 manipulating it and how you can see that through the entire corporate and artistic history of Disney Studios. So it's about like Disney movies and how they're all connected. They actually all sort of tell stories about IP in certain ways and how we sort of miss that angle on them very often, very frequently, and misunderstand how much IP functions in the broader society, because, for example, fast fashion companies, now I know you said talk about Disney, I'm talking about something else, but fast fashion companies, they actually own very, very little materially. So their offices are leased mostly, their factories are contracted, you know, everyone who makes the sewing is contracted.

Starting point is 01:03:10 They might own their stores, but they probably lease their stores, right? They, like, have very few direct employees other than, like, store level, if they don't franchise, but they might even franchise. not even employ the store level people, but they probably do. Store level people, corporate employees, and then they own their IP. And maybe they own a headquarters building somewhere, right? Like, that's a fancy building. And everything else is quote unquote owned by them controlling the designs, the logos, the images, and they can guarantee that they can make almost infinite money off of that because the global trade regime enforces copyright law in a way that would make

Starting point is 01:03:48 people who would like to see any human rights thing enacted blush with shame. And it is incredibly effective. It is the one thing that international law does quite well is enforced copyright and trademark and patent. So when you have stuff like the, you know, you can no longer ship under $800 without tariffs, like those companies are entirely reliant on being able to move these products as cheaply and as quickly as possible because they don't own ships. They don't own factories. They don't even really own the, you know, they, they own the shirts only when they arrive on American shores, really. This has always been the dream of reproduction of capital, which is to have a company with no assets that makes money. Exactly. And they're so close. They're so close.

Starting point is 01:04:26 And all this stuff is destroying it. So I was like, well, great. Now I've written this whole book about how Disney, you know, is actually really like a state actor. And like they have, they have like a sovereign territory in Florida that people talk about a little bit called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which you may or may not know about. People talked about Celebration Florida a bit when that happened in the 2000s, which is like a weird, creepy company town that they run. They actually own a huge section of, it's like two counties, it's larger than the size of Manhattan, in central Florida. Jesus Christ. What?

Starting point is 01:04:57 The conflict with DeSantis over the don't say gay bill, which people, you know, interpreted largely through the lens of the, you know, horrifyingly reactionary politics he was pushing, which is understandable, is also a conflict over sovereignty in Florida. Because they don't pay taxes in the same way. They make their own laws. They have their own police force. So basically. Jesus Christ. Disney made the first network state. They did it.

Starting point is 01:05:21 They actually did it, and they've been doing it for 30 years. Oh, no. Jesus Christ. 69 is when they get the deal for really crazy. Holy shit. We've had it for a long time. People don't love to talk about this for some reason. I think it's really interesting, terrifying, but really interesting. But the reason that that's all really, really connected to intellectual property is because

Starting point is 01:05:39 one of the things that Disney did, despite, you know, having literally their own state-lit in the middle of Florida, is maintain themselves as the magic kingdom. They are associated with childhood, nostalgia, magic, even as they've grown and grown and grown as this behemoth. Like, they've managed to largely stay connected to this sort of image of American innocence and childhood. And there have been moments in the 90s. They overreached a bit. There's been, like, you know, there have been problems and you can read all about that. But basically, they did image management on all these different levels. So they managed Mickey Mouse. They manage the law around copyright, like copyright extensions famously were largely driven by

Starting point is 01:06:20 Disney lobbying in 1976 and then again in 1998. Anyway, so all of these things, I'm trying to reduce a very big argument to a very small package here, but basically Disney designed and the other IP businesses that work around it have figured out that if you can control the way your product appears in the market and you can control the images and the feelings people have about them and the sort of thoughts and stuff, you can really do whatever you want materially behind the scenes, right? That, like, that, like, controlling an image is so powerful. And part of why, like, what's happening with Disney, why it's falling apart so fast is because

Starting point is 01:06:57 if they give in to Trump at all, it requires shattering that image that has been a century in the making, right? Like, part of what was so brutal about the thing with Jimmy Kimmel was, like, it's just obvious that Disney did that, that the corporate people did that, and they did it because Trump did it publicly. Yeah. Trump is humiliating these corporations publicly, right? He's humiliating them.

Starting point is 01:07:19 He's forcing them to come to heal. It's not working popularly. He's not capturing anti-corporate sentiment, really. People are like, why are you doing that over Jimmy Kimmel? Like, that's weird. You're a creep. But then also, he's also destroying the legitimacy of everyone. It's pulling everything down around him.

Starting point is 01:07:36 It's a family annihilation, right? He's so angry about 2020 and, like, being tried that he's just going to rip everything down around him. Wow, I just said a lot of different things, but all of which is to say, like, what's so interesting about, like, the Trump regime in some ways and the relationship to Disney is that Disney has for so long built this image of America that has managed to persist, like, across and against, you know, a century of increasingly violent, ineffective, and visible imperialism, like in Korea and Vietnam, and then Iraq and Afghanistan, it was so crucial to the image of what American capitalism was. And then Trump, a man who is just as built by images as the Disney Corporation, comes and is just like, just is ripping it all down because he's sort of, you know, one gaping narcissistic wound, right? Like running a country, right? Yeah. So if you look at the history of like Disney in general, Hollywood, and intellectual property management in general, what you can see is the way that we have, that this media apparatus has been built.

Starting point is 01:08:38 When I say media apparatus, I think people tend to think, you know, when you talk about images or. or the spectacle or whatever, they just think about stuff on TV. But, like, no, it's also all the products that circulate through society. And it's, like, the way that you get paid for your job with, you know, like, the idea of clout is, like, actually part of that. Like, it does function as a form of payment, right? Like, it's not, like, people make fun of that, like, oh, good. But, like, then everyone acts as though it's real, right?

Starting point is 01:09:02 And when everyone acts as though it's real, it's real, it's a social relation. So the entire spectacular economy, which is built entirely on images that rely only on being forced through a sort of massive group thing from the top of the economy and the political class was built by these corporations but it was built explicitly to you know reap as much wealth as possible

Starting point is 01:09:23 for their shareholders yeah yeah to make money yeah Trump is too perfect a product of that and this regime is too perfect a product of that and now it's all it's all you know it is its own grave digger you know yeah the point has a line about like the way that the spectacle sort of like intrus into

Starting point is 01:09:39 and like becomes reality and like If Disney is sort of like the stage manager of this, right? Like, Trump just is the thing, like, come to life and powering through it. And she doesn't, because he is the image and not the thing that creates the image, she has different interests. Yes. Than the people who create the image who are, you know, trying to make money. Trump is trying to, like, satisfy all of his, like, vindictive sort of narcissistic

Starting point is 01:10:10 rage. Exactly. It's worth remembering that, you know, although the damage he's doing is extremely real, he genuinely is fighting over the election and over like Comey. Like he is like, he really believes these things. This is a regime that believes the things that, for example, Karl Rove would teach people to say to get away with doing what they wanted to do, right? These are, as you said, they are the image itself. They are true believers in the spectacle. And as such, break the fourth wall, right? If we're going to use a theater metaphor, here. As such, they end up, they end up, like, just destroying it. And I think Trump's power was that he could puncture the spectacle, right? And then there were all the people, as you described

Starting point is 01:10:52 and the people who make the spectacle, maintain the image, make the image, they were around him. So they would just, they would just close up the puncture. They would close up the suture. They would work really, really hard, right? So what I mean by that is, like, Trump would say something absolutely unhinged. And the New York Times would be, like, controversial statement from President Trump, right? Which, like, completely normalizes it. And, like, everyone would sort of pretend that he hadn't just said

Starting point is 01:11:13 the most unhinged lunatic shit. And this is the first administration I'm talking about, right? Like, people would just pretend that it was normal. Yeah, that he was speaking at four-season total landscape. Yeah, it's just, like,

Starting point is 01:11:23 shit would happen. Exactly. And everyone would sort of try to it would normalize it. And that normalization repaired the fabric of the spectacle. And it made Trump's fans really happy because you get to watch

Starting point is 01:11:35 august institutions, such as the Washington Post, going over backwards to make an obvious, obscene lie seem like a reasonable claim, right? So they were humiliated in fixing the spectacle behind him as he punctured it, right? But he has actually too successfully gotten rid of everyone who did that repair.

Starting point is 01:11:57 He actually thought they were his enemies. The rhinos, right? The Republicans who kept him in line, the Democrats, the media, they have been purged. They have all been purged and controlled. And now they all just repeat what he said. says. And what ends up happening is that the spectacle just remains torn and people see through

Starting point is 01:12:14 it. Like, it's just not working anymore. And I think what's scary is that it still feels like they're repairing the spectacle around his claims. Because the entire media is speaking as one and the Democrats are speaking as one and the Republicans are speaking as one. And they're all agreeing. You know, we imagine someone else, John Q. Public, sitting there and seeing that and going, oh, okay, it's all pretty normal. Like, oh, Charlie Kirk was a good guy, you know? We sort of project that that person is there. but actually more and more people who would have been like that in the first regime

Starting point is 01:12:44 are like, well, I don't believe any of this shit. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's also worth saying, like, the way that we're talking about this in terms of his unpopularity and reality, in terms of why it feels like this, it doesn't mean that there's not just horrible shit happening constantly, right?

Starting point is 01:12:58 And that's the other part of his ability to sort of eliminate the legitimization part of the spectacle was that like that, it was to some extent, restraining him, right? Like, that's the reason why there wasn't just, like, there were a bunch of deportations to Trump. There were a bunch of deportations under Biden. The thing that's happening now is not the thing that was happening before, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:13:21 The secretary of the interior wasn't showing up at, like, 5.30 in the morning in a suburb of Chicago to blow up someone's door and drag a bunch of American citizens out of their house. Like, that was, like, not happening before. before and that's what it's just you know it's unbelievably horrifying and it's also not popular right like even even those approval rating numbers right like you know like his immigration policy in theory is the most popular thing he's doing and also ice can't do mass large scale raids because if they stay in one place for too long so many people will show up they can't do it and you know, and the lightning raids that they've been doing

Starting point is 01:14:05 have been really brutal and really effective. But like, those are not the tactics a storm trooper force that broadly has popular consent. Yeah. Right?

Starting point is 01:14:15 They don't move like that. And, you know, I talked about this, I guess it'll be like two weeks ago on executive order, but like, people are like stopping these raids in like Wheaton.

Starting point is 01:14:26 Yeah. Like, Wheaton used to be literally the center of the base of power of like the Bush administration moral majority shit. For like 40 years, this was like the center of the Christian right. And they have lost Wheaton. Yeah. It's been like electing Democrats. And it's not just elected Democrats. Like the speed of which has moved from electing Democrats to like a bunch of

Starting point is 01:14:47 people showed up and are stopping like lightning ice rates, which is really impressive genuinely, very, very impressive organizing. It's very hard to do. Most times it doesn't work because you can't get there fast enough. And somehow, again, like the place that used to be the capital of the moral majority. It's like Jerry Farwell's fucking, like, home domain, right? Like, the epicenter of, like, of the Christian right is doing the anti-ice

Starting point is 01:15:11 raid shit. Like, what? Like, and this is something that's been going on for, like, you know, probably like four or five years, but like, them doing like really serious, very good direct action. The entire terrain of the world is shifting beneath us

Starting point is 01:15:24 while all of these people constantly try to, like, paint over this like little tiny scaffolding they've set up to be like, no, no, the ground's still there. There's all these holes in the middle of it, but, like, you know, we're going to put us some tarp that, like, looks like the sky beneath it. It's like, wait, why is the sky down? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:15:39 Don't ask questions. Just keep walking. Exactly. And I think that's, like, I think that's really important. And a thing that I think happens sometimes when I sort of make this analysis with my friends, I think they think that I'm saying that, like, fascism isn't here or that, like, this isn't a fascist regime or that, like, they don't want to, like, do Naziism. Like, they very clearly do.

Starting point is 01:15:57 Yeah. My analysis has been, like, since February. I mean, part of what's happened is, like, in February, when the Doze stuff was going on, I was like, well, the American Republic is over. Like, we'll never be able to go back. Like, now, what do we do? So I think, like, a lot of the disjuncture and the confusion and the craziness feeling that people are having is because people are coming to those realizations on separate timelines. Because it's really hard to accept. It's a hard and complicated thing to feel and to recognize that actually, like, this is a dying regime and a dying empire. Yeah. And, like, that does not mean it's less dangerous.

Starting point is 01:16:30 In fact, historically, it's often more dangerous and it's death throws. And it does not mean, when you and I talk about him being ineffective, it does not mean that the stuff he's doing isn't terrifying. We're both trans women who organize with other trans women. Like, we know about it, okay, y'all? Like, we are dealing with the fallout

Starting point is 01:16:46 all the time. But, like, the situations that we could be going through, the situations that they could be achieving, that with the public that they were handed by the Biden administration that had broken solidarity around COVID, that had created an effective red scare around Gaza that had, like, you know, basically perpetuated two genocides and gotten liberals to, like, say that that was normal and good, right?

Starting point is 01:17:09 Like, that was a very, very scary public to hand to Nazis, too, now with nukes, right? And, like, I think, you know, we do ourselves a disservice when the only fascist regimes we think about are Nazism and when we think that, like, it's inevitably, like, going to be just like the Nazis. Or even if we just say, well, it could be more like Italy. like there are dozens of different dictatorships across the history I don't expect everyone to study all of them but like it's worth understanding learn a third one

Starting point is 01:17:36 pick one literally pick one fucking anyone that's not the main two there are so many like you have you are spoiled for options yeah yeah you can do you could do if you know pick a decade you like the 70s go for Swarto in Indonesia you like the 80s

Starting point is 01:17:51 Brazilian meditatorhip no problem like or you could do Korea in the 80s you got lots of choices oh the 50s go for Greece No problem. Don't worry about it. The reason that I bring all that up is just to say that, like, things are really bad. And if we don't, you know, throw down, this will successfully build an authoritarian fascist state eventually, just by the sheer inertia of the power that they have available on the time that they can wait.

Starting point is 01:18:15 Yeah. But as you're saying, and as I've been sort of seeing also, there's tremendous amounts of resistance. It is completely uncovered. It is not being seen. But because they live in the spectacle that they themselves have made, they also don't see and understand their level of resistance. Like, they've disorganized the FBI, right? They fired about, like, was it, like, a fifth of FBI agents, like head of agents?

Starting point is 01:18:38 And then, like, a bunch more are now doing, like, street crime and are, like, being put into ice raids. And people talk about that as being terrifying. And it is terrifying. The desire they have to do really brutal ice raids and to use every resource available to them is scary. Yeah. But also, if they don't have the FBI's eyes on the ball, which they clearly don't anymore, they have redirected the FBI. they are not nearly as cognizant of what's going on in terms of resistance

Starting point is 01:19:02 as they were even six months ago. No, like, if you look at the guy who shot Charlie Kirk, right? This is like, Carly Kirk is like their guy, right? The FBI is so stripped down right now that with a full court press, the only reason they caught that guy was because he didn't understand

Starting point is 01:19:16 that Discord wasn't private and he, like, dropped his gun and didn't pick it up again? Yeah, and his dad recognized it, right? And if he had done those two things, they wouldn't have found him. Like, yeah, they didn't. catch him she turned himself in right and that's again someone assassinated like their guy and they couldn't find him like this repressive apparatus it is really really scary and very good at doing the

Starting point is 01:19:42 thing that it's focused on doing right now which is like dragging immigrant families from their homes at like five in the morning by blowing their fucking doors down and like dragging them away to a prison, right? It's not good at anything else. And the thing, right, that is a very, very good way to create an engine of, you know, like, immense human misery that whose spectacle they can sell. But it's not actually a good way to hold together an authoritarian dictatorship. We have seen very, very successful sort of dictatorships in, in the last, like, 20, 30 years, right? Yeah. And, you know, like, they take a bunch of forms. I think, like, the most classically, like, 1930s Nazi Party one is

Starting point is 01:20:24 Modi in India and Modi in India has done the thing in the sense of like has really really successfully transformed the consciousness of people in India to this sort of like unbelievably unhinged right wing fascist version of like Hindu

Starting point is 01:20:39 supremacy. That hasn't happened here. Right. You know it's worth knowing that the RSS which is his brown shirts like has four million people in it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like I mean it has million, they have millions of brown shirts, right? Like, ICE is having trouble hiring 12,000 extra agents in a continent of 400 million people.

Starting point is 01:20:59 Again, this doesn't mean everything's fine. But, yeah, like, if you look at that, if you look at Erdogan in Turkey, or you look at Putin and Russia, or even Orban, to a different degree in Hungary, like, they slow-rolled it, right? They went through a few elections that were, like, slightly sketchy, but basically normal. And they, like, and they just slowly built power. it took them a decade to get to the point where they were openly doing the authoritarian stuff that Trump was trying to do. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:21:27 And, like, again, there's no rules. It might work what Trump is doing. But, like, compare it to Millet in Argentina, right, who they all loved so much, who came into power, similarly to Trump, started throwing truth bombs everywhere, you know, just, like, ripped apart, and has now had to come hat and hand begging for a bailout to the United States. Yep. Because his whole thing, his regime fell apart within 24 months. Yep.

Starting point is 01:21:51 there is ultimately a material limit to what you can do. Yeah. You can't just speak reality into existence for that long. Yeah. And that's the thing, right? If it was possible to just speak reality into existence, we would all be living under neoconservatism. Right.

Starting point is 01:22:05 Right. There would be like a pure, well-functioning oil extracting American clients aid in Iraq right now. Yep. And I don't know what the fuck they would have done with Afghanistan. But like, if you could just do the thing, and I've talked about this on the show, I talk about this on the show all the time, right? The thing the neoconservatives thought they could do, with evidence-based reality thing, right?

Starting point is 01:22:24 Where, like, they thought that what they could do was just, instead of observing reality and creating your positions from it, they thought they could just purely influence and manipulate reality to become whatever they wanted it to be. And they couldn't, right? Like, where the fuck is George Bush right now?

Starting point is 01:22:37 Right? Like, where is Dick Cheney? Like, the Trump administration somehow, staggeringly, has managed to, like, they finally found a war crime so bad that John Wu, the architect, like, the guy who wrote the torture manuals was like, wait, hold on, you can't just blow up random, like, boats of people in Venezuela.

Starting point is 01:22:56 Like, what? What? Like, I, I literally had not even occurred to me that it was possible for you to commit a war crime so bad that the guy who wrote the torture memos was like, hold on, hold on, hold on, whoa, I ain't set up for this shit. Like, yeah, they're absolutely, like, unhinged, they're horrible, and thank God, they are so unpopular and so bad at this. Yeah. Because if they were just a little bit better at this, I think it's very clear what they want. Yeah, we're, we're screwed. Yeah. Like, we go under it like four months,

Starting point is 01:23:31 but that hasn't happened because they're not good at this. Yeah. And they're tearing apart the very institutional apparatus like Disney. Like, they're tearing apart the very institutional apparatuses that were designed to, like, propagate them. Like, Trump could have just made peace with Disney, right? Like, Trump could have just used, you know, like, basically, like,

Starting point is 01:23:51 the way that every other being, like, the way literally the Nazis did, right? Like, until, like, literally until they were forced to break it off during, like, World War II, right? Which is, like, use Disney as a propaganda apparatus for you. And Disney was gun-shy because of the fight with, the fight with Santas didn't go that well for them, surprisingly. You know, like, they had some trouble with that. And so they were gun-shy, like, going into the administration, like, they were very quiet. Like, they were not rocking the boat. They were making lots of statements about how, like, you know, we support it.

Starting point is 01:24:17 Like, he didn't have to goad them into taking a position. in the culture world, like, they were just very glad that they weren't fighting off to Santos anymore and that they weren't fighting off, you know, the daily wire, you know, claiming that they were, you know, whatever, the woke mind virus or whatever the hell, you know? Yeah. Like, they were just putting their, keeping their heads down, trying to rebuild after the disaster of the pandemic, right? Like, trying to, like, get their cruise line back up and, like, as profitable as it could be.

Starting point is 01:24:41 You know, they were working on, like, they were just doing their thing. And they were like, no reason Trump should stop that. There's no reason Trump should stop that is what they thought. No, it's like they, they were implementing. a lot of the culture war stuff that they wanted in terms of like, okay, we're going back to white people. We're never having another non-white character again, like, eat shit. Yeah, like, they're canceling TV shows with just, like, queer characters.

Starting point is 01:25:02 Like, they're just doing stuff like that. They're doing everything that the regime wants. But as you mentioned, he's just sitting there watching TV and, like, throwing his remote around. And, like, unfortunately, his remote, like, dictates U.S. policy. Mm-hmm. I think that's an important note to close on because, like, his remote dictates U.S. policy to the extent that everyone pretends that it does.

Starting point is 01:25:26 And one of the things that can start happening in the end stages of these kind of regimes is that like the levers of power become unglued from the mechanisms of the state. Yeah. Right. So he just like declared that Antifa is like a domestic terrorist organization, right? We're going to be talking about that later this week, possibly earlier. This week, I don't know when this episode's coming out. But that doesn't do anything.

Starting point is 01:25:50 thing in and of itself. He's just like waving a magic wand around. But if he doesn't have the repressive vaporitis to make that matter, then okay, then him throwing the remote around isn't like gesturally controlling the armor of like one of the most sophisticated, what's supposed to be one of the most sophisticated repressive apparatus ever, right? And they rely on both the compliance of the state bureaucracy, which they've been decently good at pulling in line, but also they rely on our compliance for this.

Starting point is 01:26:18 and you don't have to comply with them. That's the fun thing about existence is that they can't. They can't just make it real unless you help them. And as we saw, as we've already talked about, the Charlie Kirk special doesn't go up, right? They say like the COVID vaccines are like we're going to restrict them and most of the pharmacies are just like just check a box saying you need it.

Starting point is 01:26:41 Like, you know, like not in every state, but again, like these massive institutions they can't really get them in line. So why are you letting them get you in line? Yeah, and remember, you know, like they had better control of their institutional apparatuses in 2020, and the outcome of that was there was a giant uprising and they put the president in a bunker, a thing that he's still mad about to this day, right? Even when it looks like they have total control, they don't. And I don't know if he's going to like end up in a Hitler bunker, but look, as of right now, as it stands, the record of Trump administration's ending with Trump hiding in a bunker is 100%. So, You know, if the past is to be a prediction of the future, we could can see it again when all of this shit goes to hell and the economy collapses and everyone's like, oh, this was all a lie the whole time. Wow, damn. Hey, look, like, you know. And you can say that, but I don't know if we can't. We're just going to put a really

Starting point is 01:27:44 long leap over that entire sentence and we're going to leave that sentence as an exercise to the reader. Completing the sentence. Just figuring out what it was saying, not doing the thing. Okay. This has been a kid happen here. Vicki, where can people free order your book? Oh, you can go to Haymarket.

Starting point is 01:28:05 That's who's putting it out. And they have a list of links. You can also go to my blue sky account, vikiakab. Dot B-sky.Sky.com. And you can find a link there. Yeah. And where can people find you in your work? Cawshinythings.com.

Starting point is 01:28:17 It's the collective anarchist writers or any other acronym you like, C-A-W. That's where I'm working most regularly now. Good crow-thuming. That's great. That's great. It's corvette-based. Yeah. We love a Corvid-based economy.

Starting point is 01:28:31 Thanks so much for having me, Mia. Yeah, thanks for coming on. There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed. You know how waking up from a dream,

Starting point is 01:29:06 a familiar place can look completely alien? Get back everyone. And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him. Burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town. A new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 01:29:43 The devil walks in Abistown. The humility in knowing that life is this classroom that we should never graduate for is what is going to keep you growing. And that's all that matters. World Mental Health Day is around the corner. And on my podcast, Just Heal with Dr. Jay, I dive into what it really means to care for your mind, body, and spirit. From breaking generational patterns to building emotional capacity.

Starting point is 01:30:15 Healing is a journey and wholeness is the destination. I'm going to walk away feeling very healed and feeling like, yes, I'm going to continue my healing journey and I'm going to get some keys from you. Listen to Jess Hilbert, Dr. Jay, from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories, and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of, like, butterflies. I'm Danielle Robeye, and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and IHeart Podcasts,

Starting point is 01:30:59 where we dive into the stories that shape us, on the page, and off. Each week, I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TVR pile. Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Books is the official audio book and ebook home for Reese's Book Club. Visit Apple.co. forward slash Reese Apple Books to find out more. What's up, everybody? This is Snacks from the Trapner's podcast, and we're bringing you the horror every week all October long.

Starting point is 01:31:37 Kicking off this month, I'll be bringing you all my greatest fear-inducing horror games from Resident Evil to Silent Hill. Me and Tony Bringing Back Fire Team on Left for Dead, too. And we're just going to be going over some of the greats. Also in October, we'll be talking about our favorite horror and Halloween movie and figuring out why black people always got to die first. The Umbro Reliquary invites any and all fooling, brave enough, to peruse its many curiosities. But take heed, all sales are final. Weekly horror side quests written and narrated by yours truly.

Starting point is 01:32:12 with a full episode read and a commentary special. And we will cap it off with horror movie battle royale. Jason versus Freddie. Michael Myers versus the 80th thing with the little tongue muster. October, we're doing it Halloween style. Listen to the Trap Nurs podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hello and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today.

Starting point is 01:32:38 And I'm very lucky to be joined by a couple of people who. who I am about to introduce to discuss the very important topic of does Tylenol give your baby autism? I think we probably already know the answer, but nonetheless, we have half an hour to talk about it. So you will hear Dr. Carve Hoda laughing. That's me. That's Carve, yeah, many of you will know him, but he's a medical doctor and host of the House of Pod podcast. And I'm also joined by Tyler Black, who's a psychologist in British Columbia. Welcome, Tyler.

Starting point is 01:33:09 The psychiatrist. Psychiatrist. fucked it up. Them's fighting words, James. Them's fighting words. Yeah, no, I know, yeah, this is like when people call me a sociologist, I understand, or even worse,

Starting point is 01:33:21 an anthropologist. It's a pleasure to be here, and no worries. Tyler is Canadian, so to see him correct somebody on something makes me happy. Oh, I'm very sorry. Yeah, but that's why we get him on. He's very sorry. He's very sorry about that.

Starting point is 01:33:34 I love Tyler very much. He comes on my show, not infrequently, and one really pleasant thing that's happened, one little bright spot in the last, I don't know, five years of terror that have been happening medically, is seeing Tyler gradually over time become grumpier and more willing to fight. Yeah, aren't we all? That's the only bright spot I've had. Thank you, Tyler, for that.

Starting point is 01:33:58 Yeah, you bet. I imagine that's a side effect of your consumption of acetameter finish. It's maybe also made you. Yeah. Got to cut back, bro. Got cut back. Yeah. All right.

Starting point is 01:34:09 For those not familiar, where are we talking? talking about Tylenol might be the name you're familiar, if you, especially if you're American people like to use brand names a little more. I still find that very confusing and I've lived here for the better part of two decades. But why are we talking about Tylenol? Tyler, do you want to introduce this concept? Sure. So, yeah, Tylenol goes by paracetamol in the UK and other places in the world. It's acetaminopin here. So it really is not talking about Tylenol, though the shorthand that the political people who've been talking about it had specifically called out the brand Tylenol, which is bizarre.

Starting point is 01:34:45 But this stems from both a mission that RFK Jr. when he took over as the HHS sort of had, which was to find the cause of autism, which is, you know, his political quest to find some environmental cause. I mean, he started as an environmental lawyer. I don't think he's doing this disingenuously. I think he truly believes there was an environmental cause to autism. But of course, RFK-wheeled science, probably driven by the brainworm. And so he has this way of having a conclusion and then finding the science to support it. And it was very clear that he was going to point vaccine, vaccine schedule, and at some point this is definitely coming. I think this might be a roundabout way to do it through fevers and Tylenol. But the Tylenol link is something that has been a

Starting point is 01:35:35 question mark. So a really quick aside will be that when drugs are regulated, The drug companies have very little natural interest to study it in pregnant people. It only brings them risk. There's no reason to do it. You are required to submit what studies you have on animal toxicity in utero and these types of things, but not really that much for humans. And so the drug companies usually put their hands up and go, talk to your doctor about using this.

Starting point is 01:35:59 And then the rest of us in medicine have to take that information that's been generated about this medication and try and interpret it on pregnant people. And it creates this system where we create the evidence over the next 20 years in what we call pharmacolids or post-marketing studies where we basically, has there been a problem? Did we find any birth defects? And we kind of do it backwards. It kind of makes sense because you couldn't really do an RCT on pregnant women to start with if you didn't know any reason for the drug. So it's one of those sort of loopholes. And so this natural conversation has resulted in science that points in.

Starting point is 01:36:38 number of directions. Does the Cetaminopin cause autism can't be answered by the current science because it's all cohort data. It's looking backwards. It's looking at populations. It's confounded. However, the best study was published in 2024, which makes the timing of this announcement really awkward. There was 2.5 million people. It was a, I believe it's a Danish study. Swedish. Swedish study. Okay. And in that study, there was a small link found. But because they had 2.5 million people, they could check that link by looking at sibling pairs within that 2.5 million. So in that group, they had 16,000 sibling pairs, both exposed to and not exposed to acetaminopin. And lo and behold, they found that there was no relationship there. So this really is one of the more

Starting point is 01:37:22 definitive correlational studies that says pretty much any effect we're seeing is probably confounded. It probably isn't due to the acetaminopin, though there are some animal studies that might hint at it. it appears to be minor and Kavei I see you're about to say something yeah first of all that's exactly right I think that there are a lot of things that maha and rfk junior talk about that are just insane and you can dismiss out of hand this is a topic that is not complete rubbish it is something that has a little bit of nuance and we can talk about as tyler was just mentioned there is some evidence that there might be a small relationship but the real key is determining if it's a causal relationship or just correlative?

Starting point is 01:38:05 Are they just related for some reason or another, or are they caused by each other? And that study that he talked about, that Swedish study looked at about 180,000 infants that had parents that were exposed to acetaminophen. What's really elegant about that is that it looked at the siblings. That's why it's such an important study. And that's, would I say it closes the door on the matter? No, I agree with Tyler. I think the preponderance of evidence now is that there is no,

Starting point is 01:38:33 connection between Tylenol and autism. But I don't know if this study totally closes the door. It is really well done, though. So they showed that if you look at siblings, if you look at a family, there's no connection. You take out some of the variables. You take out some of the confounders there that can obfuscate or confuse an issue. You take those out of the picture and you see that there's no relationship between Tylenol and Sino-Menephine.

Starting point is 01:38:59 What's interesting in that same study, that's what we just study, if they then put those back in if they didn't account for the siblings, then yeah, it showed that there is a little bit of evidence, a small, basically relationship between, you know, acetaminophen and developing autism. But once you start accounting for some of these really tough to account for variables, then you start to see that that falls apart. And that implies that most of these other studies are not causal, but correlative relationships. The sort of 2025, update is, and I think this might, I think as that we learn more mudd, this might have been something that was either solicited or developed in tandem with RFK and his goals, but there was a

Starting point is 01:39:45 publication in 2025 by, I think, the Harvard Dean of Medicine, who has been a plaintiff's witness for attorneys battling Tylenol in developing autism. So there is a bit of a financial conflict of interest there. Right. Yeah. Baccarelli. Yeah, Dr. Baccarelli, who, published a study called a navigation review, and it's basically a sciencey version of, let me tell a story, and here's the evidence that supports it. Basically, what they did is they took the number of studies. They counted the number that pointed towards Tylenol as a factor, and they counted against it, and they found about 20-something in total. The majority of them found a link to Tylenol and autism, and then a minority found no link. But of course, that's not really how we do science in

Starting point is 01:40:32 2025, if we had two studies, and you can actually look at his studies, and some of these studies are 200 people, 300 people, 500 people. And then you have this other study that's 2.5 million people, you know, in the real world, that larger study would dwarf the significance of the other ones. But in the way that this navigation study was set up, they're all kind of equal. In fact, he treats the non-confounded sample that Kave was mentioning as its own study. And then he treats the controlled sample with siblings as its own study. So the same study from Sweden was cited twice one for and one against. You can see how you could shape a narrative, which is what a narrative review is. It's when you shape a narrative. It's not a very sciencey way to do things. We like to do

Starting point is 01:41:21 systematic reviews. And this did provide a bit of cover because now everyone in HHS can point towards this study by the Harvard deed of medicine published in BMC environmental studies, peer-reviewed, showing that a navigational study shows that there could be a link. But it really, if you read the study, any scientist reading it, it would be like, yeah, there could be a link, but the largest study in that group suggests there is no link. Right. Yeah, in terms of someone's playing games with evidence to when they've already decided what their conclusion would be. Yeah. Let's talk about this fascination with autism that exists in their

Starting point is 01:41:58 Maha, make America healthy again, for those who are not familiar. What's happening here? People are probably diagnosed with autism at a higher rate now than they were when these people were young, right? That is not however, well, I will let you guys explain that. Explain how that doesn't mean that we're giving children autism, if that is my understanding is correct. Sure. I mean, I'll jump in first. So there's a number of ways to test whether or not the rate is truly increasing. So the first thing to say is over the world, We've seen a gradual increase in the global population that has autism from about 0.8% of the population to about 2% of the population.

Starting point is 01:42:38 That's what's happened over the past 25 years of studies across the world. Now, that's not exactly the exponential rise that you often hear about in the United States. The United States has a lot of unique features, so you have a ton of people working in this area, you have a ton of researchers, lots of people have access to health care. There's many reasons why global numbers might not look like American numbers. But the general idea behind this increased rate of autism, most of that increases due to our change in diagnostics and the way that we label things. So when RFK was a kid, there were kids that were excluded from school because they were literally called retarded.

Starting point is 01:43:13 They were not allowed to come to school. They were known as spazas and goofs and they were the ones that, you know, were made fun of. And they struggled throughout life. Now, were they called autistic? No. Did they have the same symptoms that the kids today that are being diagnosed with autism have? probably. And the way that we can control for that, there's some really elegant studies. One is we take diagnostic criteria from children, and then we ask adults currently living today

Starting point is 01:43:39 to go through a structured interview looking for those things. And guess what? We find the same rate in adults that we see in kids. This idea that it's an exponential rate. Now, I think the rate is also increasing, but I think it's increasing gradually. And this is because the extreme of ages are having kids more often, especially at the older end. We do know that older age is related to autism, especially older age of the father. And we also know that premature babies and babies with significant developmental disabilities are surviving their postnatal period. As soon as they're born, instead of instantly dying or dying during childbirth or not being able to be resuscitated, they're kept alive and survive. And this is good. But this does mean that there's more

Starting point is 01:44:23 neurodiversity in the world because, of course, these children have encountered significant harm. Yeah, I agree with that. I do think that the diagnostic criteria has expanded, and that's part of why we see more. But yeah, I think the two things we know that are related are some genetic predisposition, if there's people in the family that have it, and the older age of patients. And as we get older, I'm an older father myself, you know, you see more with older patients. And that's more common now than it's ever been before. So these are all a part of it. And once you take a look, for example, going back to that Swedish study in 2024, that was so good, that sibling study looks at the genetics of it. And once you account for the genetics of it,

Starting point is 01:45:06 you start to be able to say, okay, maybe this other stuff like Tylenol isn't important. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a gender element to this as well? Yeah. I may have misremembered here, my understanding is that women, femme people tended to be diagnosed at a lower rate until relatively recently. Yeah. So not only is there a gender component, but I do think that the biological sex of the child has an impact on the genetic expression because it seems like the transmission to males is higher than the transmission to females. So there might be something buffering about that extra X chromosome. You know, we have this shrippy little Y chromosome that makes us all degenerates. You only have one Y chromosome. You tuck.

Starting point is 01:45:47 Sorry. Are you a super male? I have two Y's. Kavez Y Y. If you know, hairy, my ears are. So there are a number of disorders that the X, the extra X chromosome is protective for. And I do wonder if that's the case for autism. But what's also true is we have stereotypes about what girls should be and what boys should be. And that leads to boys being diagnosed with autism more frequently than girls. So the girl that's quiet and awkward and anxious is labeled as an anxious kid.

Starting point is 01:46:16 a lot more quickly than when you see that in a boy that the parents think autism or the clinician thinks autism. So there could be some social reasons for that discrepancy as well. And then the last thing I really wanted to say is the really tragic thing about all of this is profound autism, which autism is a spectrum. Profound autism is extremely disabling for people around the person. Generally autistic people enjoy their lives, especially if the world is set up in a way so that they can live safely and without impediment.

Starting point is 01:46:46 Autistic people are perfectly content to be autistic. And this whole idea of autism being this travesty, this epidemic, this blight on society, is really doing a disservice to the wide variety of people that we're now calling autistic. Because when our criteria expanded, we created a whole space of autistic people who are very what we would call non-profound autism. These are people that have difficulties in social communication or do the same thing over and over despite, you know, it being at an abnormal level, but it's what they need to soothe themselves. You know, that will be called autism now. Now, would a parent want a child who's in a home constantly rocking back and forth and just soothing themselves by licking their fingers or whatever, you know, some very severe autistic behavior? No, that probably wouldn't be the parents ideal. But I've worked with so much autism in my life. I've, I'm a a child and adolescents and psychiatrists, they've seen so many autistic kids. They can live happy, happy, happy lives autistic. So I'm not a fan of the blight sort of messaging of it either.

Starting point is 01:47:52 Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that because that's one of the worst things about, in a sense, one of the most damaging things about it. People who are living happy, healthy, and fulfilled lives are being like slandered or pathologized or rioted by the government of this country and that's fucked. Yeah. And I'm sure we'll have an impact on those people because it would have an impact on anyone to see this condition that, as you said, right, like may be difficult for people who are not familiar with it to navigate, but it doesn't mean that you can't have a fulfilling and happy and very pleasant life suddenly suggested there's some kind of massively disabling and terrible travesty. And that the person who gave birth to you is to blame for this,

Starting point is 01:48:33 right? Right. That's what really bothers me is like we're always trying to find ways to blame mothers. This is, this is a mantle. And I apologize for that listener. Please don't at me for that. But part of what this is is like control over women. And, you know, while that Swedish study mentioned may not completely close the issue, I think it's pretty clear that the evidence pretty strong against there being a connection between Tal Nal. And to make a wholesale governmental recommendation as a country for us to move this way to make such strong claims to have a president come out and just say,

Starting point is 01:49:11 grit your teeth and bear it to women in regards to the one medicine that we've told them they can use during a pregnancy is insane to me. Yeah. So there's the autism issue and the insult essentially to that community, but also to women in general, it's insane to me that this is happening right now. Again, there is a bit of nuance to this issue, as I mentioned. It's not like totally insane to ask about and question it, but to make a wholesale directional change. in how we recommend managing patients with our pregnant is nuts. It's just nuts. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:49:48 And to piggyback on that, you know, like it's really normal. It was normal advice in 2024 for us to say, yeah, you can use Tylenol, but try to use it sparingly. We're not really sure. Use it when you need it, though, because we do know that pain and fever and these types of things are bad for the baby. Right. You know, so this kind of way in which it's now been massage.

Starting point is 01:50:09 So I saw a letter from Dr. Marty Macquarie, who's another grifter, who's now in the American political system there, has written a letter basically saying at the bottom, use it judiciously, and it is the only one that's approved. But that's exactly where we were before. There was no need for a pest conference. Every doctor was saying, use Tylenol sparingly, but you can use it. James, can I tell you what's driving me crazy about this? Yeah, please. This administration has done something, Trump in general, has done something. that has blown my mind,

Starting point is 01:50:42 which is somehow time and time again, I find myself defending people and things that I would never want to defend. Like, first of all, I'm watching Jimmy Kimmel. I don't know how that happened. I blame Trump for that. Second, like, Tylenol is a dangerous medication. I'm a liver doctor.

Starting point is 01:51:02 Yes, suicideologist. I deal with Tylenol overdose is causing acute liver injury and acute liver failure. is a massive real issue across the world. And it is, it's a real thing. So there are reasons that we should be watchful of Tylenol, but this is not one of them. Right.

Starting point is 01:51:21 Yeah. Personally, I'm a champion of all Tylenol should be like the UK. It should be an individually wrapped pieces because there is evidence that that reduces the rate of intentional overdose and even ICU overdoses that cause liver failure. So take away freedoms. Right. This is the medical freedom crowd. It's amazing.

Starting point is 01:51:39 Yeah, we should take an advertising break and then come back, so we'll do that. Oh, God, that would be fantastic if I could take an advertising. I could use an ad right now so bad. It's going to be for fucking lemon pepper water, which is the only pain treatment you should be taking. Bark to put between your teeth. Yeah, sure, yeah. Just go get some leaves and fucking eat them walking around. All right, we are back.

Starting point is 01:52:15 Thank you for that message from leaf pain relief. Hit the spot. It's good. Don't eat leaves. I saw someone posing with a, they were taking their graduation pictures, very nice setting. I'm not going to say the flower,

Starting point is 01:52:27 I guess just in case, you can call it quite remarkable hallucinations, and it's not a good idea to be like huffing it. Yeah. It's a nice looking flower. If you didn't know, you might huff it. Well, now I want to know what the hell you're talking about. You're going to tell me later,

Starting point is 01:52:39 You've lived in California your whole life. How do you not know this? Yeah, I'll text you after we're done. Dandelions? Is it dandelions? I've been told not the store. It's roses. It reminds me, though, there was a TikTok video of,

Starting point is 01:52:52 there's been a few of women proudly being pregnant in ingesting Tylenol. And to be clear, that's an insane response to this problem. Like, please don't take Tylenol as a point, as Kavé was saying before the break. Right. Halenol does deplete the glutathione in your body, and it is toxic to your liver. If your liver doesn't have the glutathione necessary, it directly injures the liver. And this is what happens when you take an overdose, is it overwhelms the amount of glutathione that your liver has, and it causes liver damage. And most pregnant women who want to keep the baby are very judicious to begin with, not just like downing shit willy-nilly, you know what I mean?

Starting point is 01:53:31 Like, they're like, oh, God, this is really bad. I better take something. And Tylenol, by the way, sucks. You know, as a pain medicine, you know, it's not going to, it's like the thing you take when they won't give you anything else. It's not a great one. So to take it from them without a good reason, without a proposed mechanism, if you're going to make extraordinary claims, you have to have, if not extraordinary evidence, preponderance of it. So this is really bothering me, as you can tell, because it does not exist. Yeah, I think something you mentioned earlier, like you said, you're back to a corner where you're defending, like,

Starting point is 01:54:07 Big Farmer and Tylenol specifically, like, is the one thing that they've tried to do is, like, inhabit nuance and then disingenuously use it. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. That's the entire anti-vaccines move. Yeah. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 01:54:22 And then it leads to people responding in a way that it raises nuance entirely. I understand where we get that response, but, like, it's not the correct response, right? Yeah. People want you to be like, this is 100% safe, right? They want you to say, this is actually the perfect medication. and it's fine, and you should have it for breakfast. Yeah, and the HHS tweeted out a statement that Tylenol did in 2017, basically saying we don't recommend Tylenol in pregnancy,

Starting point is 01:54:48 but no drug maker recommends any medication. They all say specifically, talk to your doctor about this medication. They're not allowed to recommend the medication, only doctors can. So when they're using that language and then HHS tweets it out, HHS is tweeting it out specifically to give the illusion that we don't want pregnant people to be taking this medication. They specifically said we don't recommend it, and that's a nuance, and that's how they use it.

Starting point is 01:55:13 And it just sucks. Right. That's exactly right. And Tylenol, the makers of it, by the way, I am curious about the fact that Johnson-Johnson spun off Kenview. I wonder if they knew this was coming, and that's why they did it, the same way that DuPont spun off. It was only three years ago that they did that, right? You remember like DuPont spun

Starting point is 01:55:29 off the company in charge of all their P-FAS, their forever chemicals, because they knew shit was coming down the pipeline. I wonder if that was the same reason here. Tile-L. Well, they put Band-Aid and Neutrogena in the same group. So I think it was more just to consolidate home stuff. Interesting, yeah. You've got a press conference coming next week about Band-Aid cancer.

Starting point is 01:55:50 Caused anxiety. Yeah. Anyways, it's very interesting to me that this is happening at all, really. I mean, what I thought was interesting about the press conference, and I wonder if you guys picked up on this, too, was, you know, I was wondering, why is this pivot happening? How can RFK Jr. be happy about this? He can't be happy about leaving his crusade against vaccines. The Maha community behind him clearly doesn't love that aspect. And I wonder why they were pivoting to that. And I wonder what you guys think about that. I did feel that during that press conference, Trump really went out of his way to sort of give lip service. And we should we should talk about this too about vaccines. He talked about vaccines a lot, even though there's no new evidence about vaccines causing problems. And Trump gave this. terrible advice about breaking up the vaccines, which we know is a terrible idea, because that's going to lead to decrease uptake overall. The more visits you have to go back to, the less

Starting point is 01:56:45 likely you're going to do it. So the more likely you're not going to get vaccinated. But it made me wonder why this is happening now, why they decided to make this pivot. And I wonder what you both think about that. My theory is the link with fevers. If I'm being really conspiratorial, I would say that they're going to try and link vaccine-induced fever to autism. And they're going to say, oh, we thought it was the Tylenol, but it turns out to be the vaccines. It's the fever, and the fever is caused by the vaccine. Yes, yeah. Yeah, my theory is gender, I think, that telling pregnant people to suck it up is when you've got your dudes all standing on the podium there, right?

Starting point is 01:57:28 Like the majority of pregnant people are going to be women. And it's something that men have been doing to women for millennia. Like, it's a safer bet than, yeah, your kid might die, but you know, you never know. Yeah, yeah. Which actually, you know, that brings up another thing that I think we should talk about, which is what Trump kept saying. Trump kept saying, don't take it, but he was like, what's the worst that happens? Nothing bad will come of it.

Starting point is 01:57:50 So it invokes this precautionary principle, which is like, you know, why not avoid the Tylenol? Yeah. What's the worst that can happen? And that doesn't work here. No. Because we know that people are taking this for a fever. Tylenol is not good for inflammation. It doesn't work on inflammation the way Advil ibuprofen does it, but it can work on a fever.

Starting point is 01:58:10 And we know that fever can have some risk at least as much, if not more, than Tylenol, in harm to the baby and harm to the pregnancy. So to me, the precautionary principle just doesn't apply here. And to hear the president, I never heard a president give medical advice before like that. It blew my mind. I felt like I was disassociating while I was watching this. I'm like, this cannot be real life. And he said it so unequivocally, don't take Tylenol, just suck it up. And I tweeted something that I read from Dr. Glock and Flokken, who's one of my favorite medical comedians. But he said, this will kill people. And I do agree. I think people were very incredulous when I said, this will kill people. And they were like, what do you mean people dying of a fever? I'm like, yeah kind of like fevers can be really bad for you and if you're not going to hospital and the only thing you have is Tylenol it's a really good idea to take the Tylenol and there's some people

Starting point is 01:59:06 that don't go to hospital for lots of reasons and fevers can kill you they just can yeah so I disapprove of the Canadian and Englishmen referring to the hospital as hospital I need you guys to refer to it as a the hospital I've forgotten about that yeah always for the definite article yeah taking it to a hospital yes thank you guys but yeah I think you're right like that there is no harm option here, right? Like, that is a damage is done when people don't take this. Right. I just imagine this poor mum, you know, at home, you know,

Starting point is 01:59:37 doesn't have great health care, but does have a bottle of Tylenol and is battling a, sorry, I'll Americanize this, like, 104 degree fever. Thank you. Don't make me do mad. Yeah, you're welcome. Don't make me do bad. You know, and, you know, it's around that 103-404 mark where we actually get really worried about the person's brain.

Starting point is 01:59:55 We get really worried about their health and what's going to happen. And what would happen to that person in hospital? They would absolutely get Tylenol right away prescribed by a doctor, right that moment. And so I worry about this, I worry about this mom presenting to hospital with her fever. She's pregnant. And the doctors say, okay, we're going to give you Tylenol. And she says, no. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 02:00:14 Why? Because I don't want my child to have autism. Because people are listening to this guy. First of all, again, the hospital. Second, they're going to listen to this guy. It's insane. people are really going to take this advice. And I could see, you know, especially the more Trump following people saying,

Starting point is 02:00:32 you will never give me Tylenol, not in this hospital. And so it does sound silly that not taking Tylenol could kill you, but if you're so scared of Tylenol because it causes autism that you don't take it when it's recommended to you by a doctor, where it's prescribed to you by doctor, you could die. And I won't be surprised when there are more fever-induced deaths in 2020. in 2026 in the United States. I already have the CDC wonder data search ready to go

Starting point is 02:00:58 because I study mortality all the time. And I am absolutely sure we're going to see a few more fever-induced deaths than we would have previously. Jeez, yeah. Maybe like we can finish up by explaining to people. like, you know, if you're talking to someone in your family, right? Someone who maybe isn't a listener, sadly, to either of our podcasts. I know this isn't directly the area either of you specialize in,

Starting point is 02:01:33 but from what I understand, pregnant people, like the way that drugs are categorized, as we spoke about earlier on, there's not like, yeah, go ahead and take all of these, right? There's like, probably fine if you have to, probably a bad idea unless you really need to and, like, maybe some straight up don't. Yeah. Can you explain that for people? Sure. So there's a classification system and it's technical, but it's exactly like that.

Starting point is 02:01:58 There are very few medications that are like totally fine. These are medications that are given during pregnancy that have been well studied in pregnancy. But for the most part, pretty much everything else. So in my world of psychiatry, you know, SSRIs and antipsychotics and benzodiazepines and whatnot, they all have the same classification, which is basically contraindicated. Don't take it unless your doctor. doctor prescribes it for you. Now, we still get pregnant people with depression and psychosis and who need all these medications. Yeah. And so we do have to interpret it based off of the data

Starting point is 02:02:34 that we have. And the data that we have always comes late. So if we find a problem, it's found too late. And generally, it's precautionary. So typically, I don't know, Kavei, if there's a similar thing in GI work, but like, for me, I'll get a call all the time. Oh, we have this woman. She's 32. who she's really worried. She normally takes antidepressants, but she's thinking about stopping them because she's really worried about passing it to her baby or whatever.

Starting point is 02:02:58 And I'm like, how bad is the depression? Well, it was really bad. She was hospitalized three times and nearly died. I was like, you'd probably want to keep antidepressant treatment going and just let her know that there could be some harm to the fetus,

Starting point is 02:03:10 but depression is way worse. And we just go with God, you know, do your best. There are certain medications where we are going to say you absolutely shouldn't take these during pregnancy. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:03:21 And you should discuss that with your obstetrician. You should talk that over with your gynecologist and your primary care doctor. You should talk it over with your medical team. That's great. But every medication has some small amount of risk, some larger than others. But it's really about the risk versus the benefit. And this has been well studied by the experts. And what you've heard, what those people have heard from Trump and RFK,

Starting point is 02:03:51 Jr. is well outside of the normal recommendations from the experts like the ACOG, the American College of Obstetricians and gynaecologists. The people who have been keeping our pregnant patients alive and relatively well for many, many years. This is well outside of those recommendations. And while it's an interesting topic, and I think maybe, you know, sure, I'd like to see more studies on it. I'm never going to say don't study this more. Right. I would say that the preponderance of evidence and scientific belief and medical belief in this one goes against what they're saying. And I would say at least talk it over with your doctor. If you have a question, talk it over with your doctor. And that's, you mentioned before town law has sort of like,

Starting point is 02:04:36 you know, try to hedge its bets by saying talk it over with your doctor. But the reason they do that is they know most doctors are going to be reasonable about this and follow the scientific evidence that's there. So I would say if they really have a question, they should talk about with their doctor because Trump, whether or not they love him or not, this is well out of his range of understanding. And he is getting, it's like a game of telephone. He's getting a version of the medical information transmitted to him by RFK Jr., who is getting a weird version of it from his belief system. And it's being supported by people who are there solely just, just there to do the beck and call of Trump at this point.

Starting point is 02:05:20 And that's super dangerous. And so if they can keep an open mind about it, talk it over with their doctor, continue to do what their parents did, I think they're going to be okay. Yeah. Real quick, because like, for reasons that are largely related to the way that we do healthcare in the United States,

Starting point is 02:05:36 people sometimes are reticent to talk to their doctor, unable to talk to a doctor. Reliable sources of medical information versus the shit that you find on Google. give us like a five-minute primer. Yeah. So, you know, in almost every jurisdiction, there is an official health agency that you can go to their website and get good health data. So in BC, we have HealthLink BC, and there's a number that you can call to speak to a nurse. In America, you have great.

Starting point is 02:06:04 I would say it used to be great. Like Cleveland Clinic used to be really great, but they got a little hokey. I would still say, you know, there are some really good American places that you can go. Male Clinic has a lot of public-facing information that has pretty good general descriptions. But just make sure it's from a place that is official because there is a whole space now that's going to be opened up because the second part of this presentation that RFK gave was about a generic medication that might help some people with a very specific form of autism. And I promise you the amount of huckstering that's going to happen based on that, the alternatives. you know, we made a joke about lemon water before the ad break, but there are going to be people who are going to be selling the alternative to Tylenol that is autism-free.

Starting point is 02:06:51 And that's really worrisome. Yeah. Be wary of anyone that has something in their Instagram, their TikTok, their wellness post that uses the words detox, be wary about ancient remedies, be wary about anyone that is selling something. thing, like Dr. Oz, who, by the way, sells a version of the folinic acid or the leukovorin that they're talking about here. So be wary about that.

Starting point is 02:07:21 We don't sell shit. Be wary about people like Dr. Baccarelli, the dean of Harvard epidemiology, who, by the way, I've heard is a good doctor from the friends I have in Harvard. They say he's not a bad guy. But be wary about the fact any time you see someone's making $150,000 off a court trial to sue Tylenol and has a vested interest in these things. So you should be wary about those things. That's definitely something to look for. And if you're looking for a trusted source, speaking of Hucksters, you could listen to my podcast, The House of Pod, anywhere you find

Starting point is 02:07:54 podcasts, where we're going to talk about medical stuff just like this, and I will bring you trusted sources. Beautiful. That was all a long play to get you to listen to Gave's podcast. I mean it for the long con. I'm in for the long con, buddy. Yeah. Thank you for helping us clear that up a bit. I think it's a real rough time for health care in general and especially people with autism. Like neurodivergent people, it really fucking sucks to see the entire federal government bad-mouthing people. So, yeah, we are thinking of you. Very similar to the issue with trans kids. Like I'm a Canadian, you know, and we have right next door to my province, Alberta, which is very much taking the route to Florida and other things. things with respect to trans policies, and it's just got to suck to be a trans kid in Florida right now. It's got to suck to be a trans kid anywhere in America right now, knowing what's coming down the pipeline. And it'll be the same for people with autism and families with

Starting point is 02:08:50 autistic kids. Yeah. I could conservatively complain about this for another three hours. Yeah, yeah. We didn't even talk about hepatitis B, by the way. We didn't even talk about hepatitis B. We can talk about that some of the point. There's just so much. There's so much, and it's so terrible. and you're absolutely right. It's really like for that community right now. By the way, I wanted to debunk something because it's been said multiple times. Yeah, yeah, get it. RFK and a whole bunch of people have said, I didn't know anybody autistic when I was, you know,

Starting point is 02:09:22 when I was a kid or whatever. I've never met someone autistic my age. Donald Triplett was the very first person diagnosed with autism in 1943, I believe, 1943. He just died last year. I think he was something like 80, 90 years old, okay? Yeah. Autistic people are old too.

Starting point is 02:09:43 This idea that there aren't old autistic people is so ass backwards. It was just not diagnosed. Yes. And it's such a shame because when Donald Triplett passed, you know, like people in psychiatry knows, that's not the type of thing that people in the world notice, but he was the very first autistic person. He lived a full life. He was an engineer.

Starting point is 02:10:05 He had autism. It was diagnosed. He was the first ever case diagnosed. And he also lived a life. And so for RFK to just erase him completely and say, I've never known an old person to have autism. It's just ridiculous. Yeah. And if you conduct yourself as RSK does, but it being a piece of shit to neurodivergent people, then even people who have been diagnosed, not just going to be like, hey, man, yeah, I wanted to talk to you about more autism. Because you're being a turd to them and like you're being unkind. Yeah. Like, what do you? you expect. Yeah. I mean, yeah, Tyler Grandin is like, how old is she now, like in her 70s? I mean, it's absurd to think that this is a totally new thing. I mean, it also tells me that he was probably a bit sheltered and probably didn't mean enough people.

Starting point is 02:10:54 Wow. Kennedy sheltered? Wow. Yeah, yeah. He's had a different experience of life to many of us. It's fair to say. I got through the whole podcast without making a Tyler Null pun. I'm very proud of that.

Starting point is 02:11:05 I usually do pretty much every time, and it pisses my wife off so much. I'm really proud of you, man. You've shown a lot of growth. Yeah, that's great. I was going to make one, but I thought I'd leave it. I didn't want to offend. Yeah, thank you very much. Where can people find both of you on the internet if they'd like to?

Starting point is 02:11:25 Or, you know, in person. Don't find me in person. Do not do that. So you can listen to my podcast, the House of Pod. Anywhere you listen to podcasts, you'll hear people like James. You'll hear people like Tyler. Last time Tyler was on was actually for episode 284. We did an episode on Adult, ADHD, with author Rax King.

Starting point is 02:11:45 She's Brad, so that's a good episode to listen to. And you can find me on Blue Sky at Cave MD. I still have a Twitter account and Instagram account, but I don't really use those that much. So find me on Blue Sky. Blue Sky, by the way, as a shout out, as a plug, I think it's good for science. If you're interested in science-based stuff, it may not be that much. much fun for everything else. But at least in terms of like, if you want to follow doctors, scientists, that's a good place to go. That's where a lot of us have gone. So I'll be there at

Starting point is 02:12:15 Blue Sky. Yeah. And I'm, I am still on Twitter, Tyler Black 32. I'm slugging it out. It is a lot of hate and a lot of death threats now, especially as I've been on a few trans podcasts. I've been on quite a few medical antivacs and vaccine podcasts. So, you know, I'll pop up from time to time on a podcast or something, but I'm not really have anything to plug anymore. I'm just really hoping that we can continue to fight this sort of, it's a really disgusting reality in this decade that misinformation has won the day and literally misinformers are the political leaders now. And misinformation has just eroded science, the point where I don't know if America's ever going to get it back. Yeah. If we do, this has set us back many years. This has said it's back many,

Starting point is 02:13:03 many years. Yeah. It's pretty bleak. Well, that was fun. Yeah. Let's end on that hopeful note. Yeah. All right. There's a vile sickness in Abbas town.

Starting point is 02:13:30 You must excise it. into the deep earth and cut it out the village is ravaged entire families have been consumed you know how waking up from a dream a familiar place can look

Starting point is 02:13:46 completely alien get back everyone and if you see the devil walking around inside of another man you must cut out the very heart of him burn his body and scatter the ashes

Starting point is 02:13:59 in the furthest corner of this town as a warning from iHeart podcasts and grim and mild from aaron mankey this is havoctown a new fiction podcast sets in the bridgewater audio universe starring jule state and ray wise listen to havoc town on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts the devil walks in avastown but the humility in knowing that life is this classroom that we should never graduate for is what is going to keep you you growing. And that's all that matters. World Mental Health Day is around the corner. And on my podcast, Just Heal with Dr. Jay, I dive into what it really means to care for your mind, body, and spirit from breaking generational patterns to building emotional capacity. Healing is a journey and wholeness is the destination. I'm going to walk away feeling very healed and feeling like yes, I'm going to continue my healing journey

Starting point is 02:15:05 and I'm going to get some keys from you. Listen to Jess Hilbert, Dr. Jay, from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.

Starting point is 02:15:27 I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robbins. and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and IHeart Podcasts, where we dive into the stories that shape us, on the page, and off. Each week I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile.

Starting point is 02:15:52 Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Books is the official audiobook and e-book, home for Reese's book club. Visit apple.c.O. forward slash Reese Apple Books to find out more. What's up, everybody? This is Snacks from the Trabner's podcast, and we're bringing you the horror every week all October long.

Starting point is 02:16:15 Kicking off this month, I'll be bringing you all my greatest fear-inducing horror games from Resident Evil to Silent Hill. Me and Tony Bringing Back Fire Team on Left for Dead, too. And we're just going to be going over some of the greats. Also in October, we'll be talking about our favorite horror and Halloween movie. and figuring out why black people always got to die first. The umbral reliquary invites any and all fooling, brave enough, to peruse its many curiosities. But take heed, all sales are final.

Starting point is 02:16:47 Weekly horror side quests written and narrated by yours truly. With a full episode read and a commentary special. And we will cap it off with horror movie battle royale. Jason versus Freddie. Michael Myers versus the 80 thing with the little tongue muster. October, we're doing it Halloween style. Listen to the trap nurse podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:17:13 Hey, everyone, it's James here. We promised that we would get you something on the changes or lack thereof after Donald Trump's series of executive orders targeting certain groups. And we reached out to a lawyer, Mo, who is a fantastic lawyer, and we asked you to you them. They said they had just done an interview with Finals to Radio, which is an excellent show, and they suggested that I take a listen to that. I took a listen to that, and I think it's a fantastic interview, and I don't think as much as we can add to it. So we're going to re-air that interview in full. The one thing I would add

Starting point is 02:17:50 to it is that there have been a number of cases recently where grand juries have not returned an indictment. That's relatively rare, but we are seeing that more. frequently. And that just enforces everything that Moe says here, which is that at this time, we still have separation of powers, and at this time, the executive cannot simply make law. One still has to be prosecuted according to a statute by a district attorney or a USA attorney, right? The president cannot just make law in this instance pertaining to the First Amendment by executive order. That doesn't mean that there will not be harassment. And as you'll hear here, those two are distinct things. And I think Moe gives an excellent outline on how we should

Starting point is 02:18:33 think about and conceive this moment in American history. So without any more of me taking your time, this is an excellent interview that bursted with Mo. I hope you'll enjoy it. And if you would like to check out Final Straw Radio, you can do so using the link that I will put below this episode. Could you please introduce yourself for the audience with any name, pronouns, location, or other contexts that would help us understand who you are? Good morning. I'm Maura Meltzer-Kohen. Everybody calls me Moe. My pronouns are they or Moe. I'm an abolitionist, an educator, and an attorney in New York. Primarily, I represent

Starting point is 02:19:12 people who are arrested in the course of justice struggles and do advocacy for incarcerated people and movements. So we're here to talk about the recent White House statements following the assassination, I mean, I mean, following the re-election of Trump, but more recently, the assassination of Charles Kirk, that Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization. Can you talk about what legally changed with the executive order of September 22nd of this year or yesterday's, when we're recording this national presidential security memo number seven titled, Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence. Again, it came out on September 25. fifth, what changed with those? Well, before I answer that question, the first thing I want to say is nothing that I say on this program is legal advice. This is information. If you want legal advice, I vigorously encourage you to have a privileged conversation with

Starting point is 02:20:14 a human attorney who is admitted to practice in your jurisdiction. As to your overall question, what changed legally? is essentially nothing. I think the top-level takeaway here is that these executive orders are frightening. They are a frightening contribution to an already dangerous political discourse, and they may very well end up being quite disruptive to left movements, including, I think, primarily centrist liberal movements. But nothing that was legal last week is illegal this week, certainly not because of those statements. And the state cannot prosecute you for things that were legal when you did them.

Starting point is 02:20:59 So, I mean, I can't see the future, but as of right now, the law and the Constitution have not changed. So if this administration wants to, in any meaningful legal way, designate anyone, any group as domestic terrorists, they can change the law, which is not going to be. quick or easy, or they can dispense with the law. But under the current legal regime, there is no mechanism that would make it illegal to be and to whatever that means, or to hold anti-catchist values, or to assemble, or to petition the government. And, you know, to be clear, not that doing any of those things are being any of those things are necessarily effective at creating social change right now. But my point really is they're not illegal. Just to sort of throw this back your way, so there was, when you were responding to that, it made me think of there's a veteran

Starting point is 02:22:03 who lost a bunch of his property during the Helene hurricane that is, you know, about a year ago hit this region. He was recorded, like he went pretty viral calling out and shouting down a state politician who had a public meeting here in the area. Just saying there's been like total lack of support after the storm and here are all the needs and you're just a lying politician, this sort of thing.

Starting point is 02:22:30 The same man right after the executive order that Trump made about burning U.S. flags went out and burned one across from the White House and then he got arrested for it. Like I thought that there was a Supreme Court decision

Starting point is 02:22:45 back in the 80s that said it's not actually illegal to burn a flag. So does that make his executive orders now law? No. There is a Supreme Court decision. It's called Texas v. Johnson. And it is still law. And in fact, after Texas v. Johnson, Congress actually tried to make a federal statute criminalizing burning the American flag. And it was found unconstitutional. It is astonishing. and illuminating that that man was arrested for burning an American flag, which is absolutely constitutionally protected conduct. I will say, I'm not sure what he was actually charged with, right? If he was charged with, you know, creating a fire hazard, I suppose that, apart from the

Starting point is 02:23:39 fact that it's clearly First Amendment retaliation, I suppose that you could be criminally charged with creating a fire hazard in a public place or something like that. But no, flag burning remains protected regardless of what the president or Congress says about it. It would take either an amendment to the Constitution or a very serious change in Supreme Court jurisprudence to make flag burning illegal. Okay. Yeah. So this is a distinction I'd love for us to get back to in a moment between like legality versus what, you know, the sort of like box that powers decide to put a thing into. Like I know I've definitely been detained not for being an annoyance to the cops, but within my legal rights, but they'll say, ah, but your shoes untied on a Tuesday and, you know, whatever.

Starting point is 02:24:37 And then like, waste my time. Let's talk about that. And because I do want to talk with more specificity about these specific executive orders and statements and also about what legal mechanisms do exist that are and can be and have long been used to surveil and disrupt and target the left. But actually, before we do that, why don't we talk about sort of some of the categories that are in playing here and be really clear about definitions or at least understand. that there are differences between these categories, right? Because there is a difference between the law and political discourse. And there is a difference, importantly, between law and power. And there is certainly at least some daylight between the legal constraints on state power

Starting point is 02:25:34 and the state's power to ignore those constraints. And then I think what will be significant to this discussion is there is a significant difference between Antifa, which is a set of practices or beliefs that are not necessarily even all that well defined, and what this administration refers to when it uses or deploys the word antifa. And there is yet more difference between the boogeyman that is being invoked by that word and the individuals and organizations that the administration actually intends to target. There's a difference between political targeting, surveillance, disruption, and prosecution, right? Those things are all different. And there's a difference between prosecution and conviction. And there is an important difference between

Starting point is 02:26:27 someone's political beliefs and associations, which are and remain protected by the First Amendment and politically motivated conduct that is illegal. So, you know, executive orders and these kinds of statements on national security are policy statements. They don't in and of themselves make things happen. They don't in and of themselves change the law. And an executive order that is inconsistent with the Constitution or existing law at least ought to be unenforceable. Okay. But yeah, but recognizing that that distinction, you know, cops are going to cop, investigators are going to investigate.

Starting point is 02:27:08 and those processes are disruptive for people whose lives they're affecting. They can affect your job prospects. They can affect your housing stability. They can affect whether or not some unhinged person decides to attack you because they've heard some conspiracy theory about you. But so that distinction of, like, well, you might get exonerated by a court after you've been held in pretrial for a year, I guess that is an important distinction, right? because it means you're not spending, you know, an extra 30 years or 20 years or whatever behind bars with the terrorism enhancement.

Starting point is 02:27:44 Well, I mean, that is also cold comfort. I'm really not trying to be dismissive. I think it's important to recognize what these distinctions are and primarily because I want people to understand what exactly we need to be prepared for and what we need to be worried about and what tools we have and what tools are effective at, resisting what's coming down the pike. And in order to do that, we need to know what's coming down the pike. We need to know who actually has power in this situation. The fact that an executive order doesn't change the law does not mean an executive order will not result in a lot more state repression or that it won't disrupt movements or even ruin lives. It doesn't mean that Trump is not going to accomplish the thing that I think he's actually trying to accomplish here in the immediate

Starting point is 02:28:32 it short term, which is broadcasting to his base that non-state action against people identified as or perceived to be part of the despised group, you know, is desirable by this administration, will be condoned by this administration. I think that is important to recognize. Saying that it doesn't change the law does not mean it isn't dangerous. I just want to be very precise about, I think, the ways in which it is likely to be dangerous and some of the ways that it might not. might not be. And again, I'm not trying to be dismissive, but state repression exists all the time. State repression against leftists and anarchists in particular has been ongoing the whole time. This is not a Trump thing. And in fact, I think it's important to note that the executive

Starting point is 02:29:21 who's probably most responsible for having laid this groundwork is Biden, who set forth a policy strategy that focused on funding the federal targeting of what at that point he was calling political extremists, which was a label that was being applied to groups on the left as well as neo-Nazis and all right groups. So this administration has already been engaged, and not just this administration, right? We have centuries at this point of targeted disruption of left movements. The way that it's currently being rationalized is a little bit different. The way that it's being broadcast, normalized, is a little bit different. But it's, I will say, I don't think this is actually anything all that new or different. And the difference in how dangerous it is is one of

Starting point is 02:30:16 scale maybe rather than, it's a difference in scope rather than nature. I think, yeah, I think that's an important distinction. I think that like sometimes people in the center and even sometimes people on the left, will look at, in particular, things that Trump administrations do because they are obfuscatory. They're, like, confusing, and they're bombastic, and there's a part of us that will say, like, no, but that's not what's actually happening. That's not what actually was the motivation for that person, or, like, that person voted, you know, Republican in the last election, whatever. And so I think that that distinction that you're making of, you know, this may not. This may be, like, an approach to motivate the base

Starting point is 02:30:57 it may prove not to be legally, like, standing, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have an impact on people. And what we should be looking for out of this is a projection of not only like a call to action or red meat for the base or whatever, but also like a clear proposition of, that's meant to chill us and chill civil society, that these are the intentions moving forward. This is the narrative and this is the story. that they're going to be going with, right? Absolutely.

Starting point is 02:31:30 And I think it is important to point out right now we're seeing a lot of people pointing out the hypocrisy and the sort of the fact that these rationales are really untethered from factual reality. And I suppose that's true and important to note, but pointing out the hypocrisy is not going to be particularly useful. I mean, I think it's part of the point, right? manipulating the facts, making narrative claims that are totally unsupportable, and muddying the waters in this really fundamental way, is part of the project.

Starting point is 02:32:08 There was a German jurist, I guess, who became the highest jurist during the Nazi regime in Germany, but continued writing theory, like was writing it before as a member of the conservative revolution, as they called it, and then afterwards he survived the war. or in continued living in Germany writing, Karl Schmidt, who talks a lot about, like, the limits of liberal approaches towards legality and liberal governance with a belief that, like, it makes sense to push it to its limits and beyond break it and recognize that governance is about the imposition of power and the sheltering of those who are under the controller

Starting point is 02:32:52 or in the protected community of the state with, a consideration of war through the state's power against internal enemies as well as external enemies. And this is the devil's bargain that we make. It's like hobbs on steroids. And it feels like a lot of the stuff that the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 has been pushing was that they have this. I know that there are some theocrats in that movement. There's the unitary executive theory that a lot of them have been pushing. And they'll play with this idea, like the Trump administration will play with this. identity of the king, King Trump or whatever, the dawn, as it were, like making these executive

Starting point is 02:33:31 decisions and being unbeholden to anything else. And they've actually been, like, you know, saying to courts, you can't stop us from deporting these peoples who with unsafe third country, whatever, stop us. I wonder if, like, I wonder if you have any comments on this if I'm coming out of left field or what. Well, look, I'll say this for Carl Schmidt, as opposed to the Heritage Foundation. He was at least intellectually. honest. Yeah, I think that we are in this moment where they're trying to normalize what Schmidt would have called like a state of exception where there's sort of unbridled executive power and the sort of suspension of any constraints on state power, right? And it's funny because

Starting point is 02:34:12 I've been in conversations over the last months where I'm talking with a bunch of my friends, none of whom are particularly enamored of the current legal regime. And we're talking about how dangerous it is that the administration is dispensing with the rule of law. And it's sort of amusing for a bunch of anarchists to be like, oh, no, the rule of law is collapsing. But when I'm talking about the rule of law in this way, I'm really talking about constraints on state power. And those are what's collapsing. And that's exactly what Schmidt envisioned and argued for, frankly. And I do think we're seeing that. I think one of the things that I think one of the things that I noticed in some of these EOs, especially the couple of statements from the last few days,

Starting point is 02:34:53 is he keeps talking about things like love of God and anti-Christian sentiment, which is, I mean, you know, this is entirely incompatible with the First Amendment, which provides that no state shall establish a religion, right? I mean, we really are outside the contours of recognized, you know, legal norms. constitutional norms. And I think a lot of this stuff is functioning and is meant to normalize this kind of discourse and to inject it not only into the exercise of government power, but to normalize it in terms of what people understand to be legitimate legal discourse. kind of shifting a bit like let's get into some of the implications of this so if it hasn't changed law but we recognize that practices and culture are being shifted i've heard of a bunch of people getting fired and getting doxing attention there's a website now i think called like who killed charlie kirk or the people who killed charlie kirk or something like that and maybe an app it's kind of like the post charlie kirk assassination version of canary mission does this mean that police are coming after people for sure Is that happening? Is that what's happening in these cases?

Starting point is 02:36:23 I mean, police have always been coming after people for sharing memes. I would say I get calls at least every month from people who have been visited by federal agents because they said something on the Internet that was upsetting to somebody else, and then they reported it, and the FBI is just following up on a tip. But that said, this doesn't vitiate the First Amendment. me say that in human language. Thank you. This does not undermine the First Amendment. The First Amendment still exists. And all of the legal framework around having the right to say things, as long as those things are not true threats, that still exists. So it is not unusual for

Starting point is 02:37:13 people to be targeted or monitored or visited by law enforcement, but typically that stuff doesn't actually really go anywhere. I am concerned about people being subject to doxing and having negative social consequences and fall out from this kind of stuff. And it certainly can be life ruining. Again, I don't mean to trivialize the effects of this kind of retaliation, social retaliation. But it is not the same thing as a criminal prosecution or a criminal conviction. It's a different set of mechanisms. Now, one thing that I do think is interesting is that these EOs and the statement that came out on the 22nd and yesterday particularly identify certain modes of that that kind of social conduct that you're talking about, like doxing, swatting, right, which is

Starting point is 02:38:06 making a false report of like an ongoing violent crime so that a swat, team shows up and raids somebody's home. Which can be deadly. Right. This is very dangerous. And interestingly, to me, anyway, there are these specific behaviors that are identified and condemned in those statements. And those specific behaviors are largely tools of the right. People on the left are not notably interested in sending law enforcement to someone's

Starting point is 02:38:35 house. So there is a perverse way in which this may end up being sort of protective, I suppose, because I think it would be very difficult for the government to go after the people who are exposing ICE agents, which again is not illegal right now, even if it were to become illegal. It isn't right now. And it would be very hard for them to go after those folks and not also go after the folks who are running that silly website about people who say something mean about Charlie Kirk. Yeah, I mean, I guess to me, and this is the speculation outside of like legal advice. or not that we're giving legal advice, but outside of, like, the legal framework. We're definitely not giving legal advice. I mean, it kind of points to a thing that already this hypocrisy or this difference between

Starting point is 02:39:22 what it's called when one party does it versus what it's called when another party does it, like outside of the fact that the government gets to do what it wants to until the government stops itself from doing a thing. I mean, it feels like it's a part of the creation of a differentiated subjectivity. Like, there's the subject of the state that falls under the values

Starting point is 02:39:40 that are being attacked, Christianity, whiteness, heteronormativity, these, like, patriotism in these certain ways versus the people that are doing these same things but are corrupt, are dirtied, our outsider internal enemies, are Soros-funded, however we want to, like, do that. But, yeah, I guess that's not,

Starting point is 02:40:06 I mean, this is nothing new. It's just an amplification of that same, right? Yeah, very much. And, you know, what is changing a little bit, although all of these threads have been present, is that this administration is rationalizing this particular kind of targeting with respect to, in particular, Palestine solidarity movements, gender nonconforming people, and what they're calling anti-fuss. So, you know, we're seeing, we've been seeing congressional investigations, the allocation of funds to federal law enforcement, purging not just individuals, but whole agency. that the administration feels are insufficiently aligned with its priority. Replacing federal law enforcement, and I mean ranging from FBI agents on the ground to DOJ, with people who will enthusiastically and blindly pursue these priorities and using a lot of resources to target the nonprofit tax status

Starting point is 02:41:04 and funding of groups identified as being aligned with any of the disfavored movements. And one of the things that they're doing is kind of, it's this real spaghetti, you know, throwing everything at it. And it's very overwhelming. It's overwhelming for movement infrastructure. It's overwhelming for legal for people on the ground. And it's all happening at once. And I think it's all being, it's mutually compounding. It's mutually reinforcing. It's demoralizing. And in particular, the stuff that's happening with immigration is so devastating. And because immigration is so wholly under the control of the executive, that is an area where he's able to sort of make a policy and make it so and have it be carried out by Fiat. And he has made his own private army with ICE.

Starting point is 02:42:00 And I think one of the effects that I'm interested in my observation that that has had is that people see that happening and assume, that he has that level of control over everything else. And I do want to point out, like, again, it's absolutely devastating to see what's happening in the immigration space. But in fact, he does not have that level of control over the rest of government and over non-immigration law. And I think that's really important to remember. Yeah, it seems about pushing boundaries and experimenting.

Starting point is 02:42:39 There's a lot of people that have talked to. And not to get too far down the road with this, but, like, with the, like, attempt to normalize sending National Guard or sending active military to different states or federalizing national guards to be present from different states in these places, almost like if it's constant and, like, overlapping enough, then eventually just military being on the streets generally rousting houseless folks is going to be a normalized thing. Man, I'm in New York. There's military people in all our subways. Like, that got very normalized post-9-11 in certain places. And so, you know, again, this is not to say that it's okay, but it isn't new. So to get back to Antifa. Sure. Antifa. Antifa. How is the administration identifying Antifa and the left? And what are they actually dismantling and attacking and attacking? I'm thinking. like I've heard a lot of talk about bail funds or like LGBTQIA youth advocacy organizations, secularist groups, like, yeah, what's going on?

Starting point is 02:43:48 Yeah, well, this is where things get really fun. Most of the groups that are actually being targeted are not remotely related to Antifa. George Soros is not Antifa. The various legal defense funds are not Antifa. Antifa is the rationale, but not the reality. So one of the interesting issues here is that a significant group of the people who really need to be very worried are people who work in the nonprofit sector in extremely normal and liberal community advocacy organizations and NGOs. And these are people who have nothing whatsoever to do with Antifa by any stretch of the imagination, who are being attacked, whose funding is being attacked, who are primarily, I would say, at risk, not because they have engaged in, anything approaching unlawful conduct. And frankly, I think the biggest risk for many of those people is the

Starting point is 02:44:44 anticipatory compliance of their funders. We have seen a really similar thing happen with universities, where universities have been targeted by the state, by the federal government, and have been accused in particular of anti-Semitism. And frankly, I think it would be the work of an afternoon for general counsel at any of these universities to point out that in fact there is a legally established difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, that criticism of the nation state of Israel is in fact entirely legally distinct from criticism of or threats against Jewish people. And if any of these universities actually bothered to challenge these allegations, I think that they would win in court on the law. And what we're seeing instead is the universities declining to challenge these

Starting point is 02:45:48 allegations, settling out of court, paying large amounts of money to the allegedly aggrieved parties and capitulating in ways that are unnecessary, unwarranted, not legally justified, irrational, and seed more ground, not just more ground than is legally called for, but more ground than is even being asked for in these cases. And so, you know, this is to me one of the great dangers of normalizing these discourses is that these large institutions are engaged in acts of self-preservation that actually undermine civil society when even a small amount of courage would go a very long way to preserving it. I think we also sort of saw this in the early days of the administration with legal firms that had brought challenges to the administration in the past,

Starting point is 02:46:47 backing down or refusing to offering their fealty or whatever to the administration. And we're seeing it now also with some of these large media corporations, silencing some of their pundits or whatever. Or in some cases, I mean, it's clearly quid pro quo because they've got, you know, a merger that's being discussed by the FCC at the moment. Well, what we've seen, though, we have seen a lot of that sort of craven capitulation. But what we've also seen is when we fight, we win. Now, I'm not trying to be a polliana about this. What I'm trying to say is the demands that are being made by this particular administration are actually so far beyond the pale that based on our legal regime, as it currently is, when we fight, we win. And so I think it is very worth reminding people that however imperfect the law is,

Starting point is 02:47:44 the current state of the law forbids much of what this administration is doing, and it is actually worth standing up to it. There are other groups of people similarly who are not related to Antifa, and one of those groups is posters, like including boomers who are on Facebook and Twitter making jokes about how the right is so hypocritical. And those people are getting targeted. And I would just gently remind everyone that the first amendment does still exist and that the solution to repression is not self-censorship, but courage. And also, as I have said many times, including to you on this program, discretion is the better part of Fowler and not everything needs to be said on the internet. So maybe think about it before you post something that you would not like to hear

Starting point is 02:48:33 read back to you by a humorless prosecutor. Then we have these other groups that are engaged in exposing law enforcement, which I referred to a minute ago. And I think the groups that are, you know, exposing ICE are definitely going to be targeted, have already been targeted for that activity. But it sort of remains to be seen how that can happen while also protecting Canary Mission, right? Then we have groups that are being perceived as or identified as Antifa, who are the people who are like doing food not bombs and community gardening and cooperative bookstores and prisoner letter writing, all of which are extremely First Amendment protected activities, and all of which are not only likely to be highly surveilled, are already highly surveilled. And this is the group of people who I think are actually probably most used to this and best prepared for it, and also might be really hard to prosecute effectively because they're not doing crimes.

Starting point is 02:49:30 And, you know, like the NGOs that we were talking about, the biggest point of exposure for all of these groups is likely to be financial. we can certainly anticipate that the state is highly interested in looking at all of our bank records to the extent that our bank records exist with all the money we have, right? Like, we're all handing around the same staff of 20 singles to each other. But, hey, you know, wire fraud. What I can say is that, you know, something like a bail fund and, you know, community support funds do need to be very cautious. that has already always been the case. And this is a really good time to hire a CPA to go over your books

Starting point is 02:50:15 and to make sure that you have kept really meticulous records, to make sure that if you have raised money for something, you have only used it for the thing that you said it was going to be used for. And this is once again something that largely is a feature of far right organizing. I don't know if you remember, but Steve Bannon, was actually prosecuted for wire fraud because he was raising money to do something. Build the wall. Build the wall.

Starting point is 02:50:45 He was raising money to build the wall, but not using it for that purpose, which is wire fraud, right? So if you run a bail fund, presumably you already know that you have to be very careful about how you raise that money and how you monitor and track and use that money. So most of the people, I would say the overwhelming majority of people who are sort of going to be subject to this kind of monitoring. A, have already been subject to it. And B, haven't actually done anything unlawful. And, you know, that doesn't mean this won't be disrupted. It just means, look, I'm not naive enough to say that your innocence will protect you, but it's a good start. And then we have folks who maybe actually do engage in unlawful conduct or revolutionary action

Starting point is 02:51:25 or people about whom that claim could somewhat credibly be made. And that's actually just a different, a different group, right? And those. things were illegal last week and they're illegal now, and they're not more illegal because they're politically motivated, right? Although, you know, there are terrorism enhancements and sentencing enhancements and things like that. The fact is, like, you know, it can't be more illegal to spray paint free Gaza on the side of a building than it is to spray paint. I love Trump on the side of a building, right? I mean, what, whether or not this like pans out in the courts, right, is one thing. But I know that, like, say for the library case that happened here,

Starting point is 02:52:04 where people were arrested because some people were filming in this, like, Palestine-related workshop in a public library, and they were asked to stop filming, and then a scuffle broke out, and a phone got knocked to the ground, and people got apparently dragged outside. Again, I was not there for this, but, like, now the people are facing, like, people who are in the crowd who are not the people who were filming are facing charges of ethnic intimidation. And that's a very specific case in a different jurisdiction from where you are practicing law. But it's not just about what's being charged against them isn't about assault, per se. It's this enhanced, politically driven statement based on the rhetoric that's, you know, based on the politics, right?

Starting point is 02:52:50 Absolutely. And I'm glad you pointed that out because I certainly do not want to suggest that politically motivated prosecutions don't happen. They absolutely happen. These reset statements don't change the way in which they happen, right? And there are ways of targeting people for prosecution based on their politics. And those have, those are, again, not new. I think the point that I'm trying to make is that I don't think this has changed substantively. Yeah, like the fact that the president said Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization just doesn't really change the legal landscape. This has been the targeted surveillance of

Starting point is 02:53:36 the left, whether you call it Antifa, whether it's the Green Scare, whether it's the Black Liberation Army. This has been a priority for decades of administrations. More and more legislation has been developed to criminalize garden variety protest conduct. We saw that a lot around Standing Rock and BLM. More and more resources are allocated to testing creative strategies for monitoring and criminalizing political activities, you know, again, state repression and the tools that are used in the service of state repression are just not new. And the fact that you put out these statements is maybe a good reminder that we should be circumspect and aware of repression and prepare to bear up under it.

Starting point is 02:54:29 So is the RICO-61 Atlanta case a model for what we see moving forward at a federal level in relation to these domestic terrorism charges, conspiracy, racketeering the focus on bail funds and other abolitionist infrastructure or civil liberties organizations? Like Section H of that September 25th statement refers to the Attorney General pursuing, quote, politically motivated terrorist acts such as organizing docks and campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass. assault, destruction of property, threats of violence and civil disorder. Like I know those are all things that, you know, they've already got charges attached to them. It's just these are now being framed within the framework of being terrorist acts. But, you know, you said like these practices of attacking adjacent, like supportive movement and civil society organs is not, it's not in and of itself new. But it seems like the framing, especially with the Atlanta case where the prosecutors brought up at the beginning, like they gave a Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of

Starting point is 02:55:34 anarchism and then said all these people fall under this umbrella because they all have this ideology, therefore they are a conspiracy. Is that what the administration is trying to do? And is that different from what they've already done at a federal level? So first of all, I do think that that's very likely that they will try. I think this is signaling a real interest in that. I don't think that's particularly new, but I think that it's clearly being prioritized. So let's talk about RICO. RICO, let's talk about RICO briefly. RICO is the Racketeer-influenced and corrupt organizations act. And it was enacted in, I think, 1970 to go after the mob, right? It was to go after crime families. But it's been used against so-called gangs and in other politically

Starting point is 02:56:23 motivated prosecutions for a long time. And so RICO is really used to kind of criminalize whole communities, but it requires that an actual crime has happened, right? Association or ideology in itself is not sufficient. So it requires an actual crime has happened. And it also requires an, quote, an enterprise, like a coordinated enterprise. And because the First Amendment protects association. And a large, diffused group of people sharing values is not an enterprise. You know, I'm not sure. It's not a straightforward path to say we want to use rego in a politically motivated way and to actually be able to capture this group under a net, right? That's like, you know, saying we want to go after Antifa is like saying we want to go after people who like

Starting point is 02:57:18 cats, right? There are people who like cats, but they certainly aren't coordinating together. I suppose that there are actually people who would say, like, yes, I identify strongly with this set of values, but it's not a membership organization. And it would, I think, be very difficult to mount a prosecution or to mount a successful prosecution on the basis of what are clearly First Amendment protected beliefs and associations. And there's pretty good law in this point. actually. And it comes from an effort to prosecute a bunch of anti-abortion protesters under RICO. And the court said, you can't do that. The fact that there's a large group of people who happen to believe the same things does not mean that they are an enterprise. So look, don't get me wrong,

Starting point is 02:58:07 again, this would be hugely disruptive. But it would be very difficult to sustain an effective prosecution or obtain a conviction if there was one competent investigator, prosecutor, judge, or jury member anywhere along the way. But yes, hugely disruptive if they managed to do it. I would like to note something about the Stop Cop City, RICO. That's important. So first of all, yay, all those charges. Those RICO's were dismissed for legal reasons of being utter bullshit.

Starting point is 02:58:40 And I know that, you know, there's some concern that that will be appealed. but I think it is worth noting and celebrating that when we fight, we win. But sort of more to the point in this context, I do want to note that Georgia's RICO statute is different from the federal RICO statute. And it's actually even worse than the federal RICO statute. And it still couldn't be effectively used in this way. And also federal RICO has often failed, right? Efforts to use federal RICO in a politically motivated way have also failed.

Starting point is 02:59:12 So if you look up like the Ohio 7, which was a fairer. early effort to bring a politically motivated RICO. That did not go great for the government. So, yeah, I think that's important to note about RICO. So you mentioned this, like, FBI designation earlier. It had been for a while, I think, under, I thought this came up under Obama, but maybe it came up under Biden for the prosecution of January 6th. But anti-government extremists, which included militia movements and also anarchists,

Starting point is 02:59:42 It's been shifted to far-left extremist in the verbiage of the DOJ and who they're pursuing. Anti-law enforcement and anti-conservative attacks have been framed as, you know, a concerted effort by far-left extremists in the media and also, like, by these institutions as they're, you know, moving forward before they actually make any arrests or whatever and through their prosecution, sometimes using terms like, you know, Antifa or Trantifa or whatever sort of, motivations they're giving. I also wonder if you could say a thing specifically about this sort of framing that is being given. Again, that is like, I was thinking about this before more recent mass shooting events that have happened or before the hull of blue around Charlie Kirk's assassination and the shooter, the alleged shooter's relationships to other people, that there seems to be this concerted effort around clinically framing and politically framing transness as a mental health issue, but also as a political extension of woke gender ideology that's coming for your

Starting point is 03:00:52 children. And it's like it's, it's interesting because like in order for people in a lot of cases in the U.S. to be able to gain access to medical care that they desire or need around maybe gender dysphoria or some other experience, they often have to use these like clinical terms for what they are experiencing and why they need medication for it and not faulting people for making that approach because you need the medicine that you need. But now this is being turned around and reframed as therefore if people need this stuff and they're making this argument, therefore they have some sort of mental deficiency or some sort of issue, which is being used in order to challenge people's right to keep them bear arms under the Second Amendment

Starting point is 03:01:39 or saying that people are like because of their transness being motivated towards this attacks. Like I don't know if you have anything to, again, not exactly like, it's not exactly a legal issue, but I don't know if you have any observations. Well, I mean, I guess when it comes down to it, just to be very clear, the DSM makes very clear that, or that being trans is not a mental illness, that gender dysphoria is distress caused by a discrepancy between the assigned gender and your actual gender, which would exist if any cis person were being treated as a gender that they didn't identify with, right? That would be a distress that would arise for any person. I think that there are real problems with the sort of clinicization or medicalization of gender-affirming care,

Starting point is 03:02:33 but I do want to be very clear that that does not have to and does not formally or officially include pathologizing trans identity. That's something that's being imputed and being imposed, but it has no basis in clinical practice. not that that necessarily matters to the government, but I do think it's important to point that out. I think given that previous efforts to restrict gun ownership on the basis of previously diagnosed mental illness have not been super successful, I don't know that this one will be either. But again, this is an issue of power and less an issue of law or logical, coherent legal philosophy. So this term has been coming up a lot of, you know, with Trump or the administration talking about domestic terrorists. There's been a lot of pushback from the legal community or from civil libertarians saying, what the hell are you talking about? Can you talk about like what it means to be called a domestic terrorist?

Starting point is 03:03:39 What changes that makes in like how the law approaches you or how you can be convicted? Yeah, gladly. So at this point, what it means to be called a domestic terrorist is actually, actually nothing. There is no legal procedure for designating a domestic terrorist group or for designating a domestic group, a terrorist organization. And given the current law on the matter, even with this Supreme Court, I think it would be very, very difficult to change the law in the way it would have to be changed in order to make that designation. There are ways to freeze the assets of a domestic group. There are ways to posit or show a connection between a domestic group and a

Starting point is 03:04:25 designated foreign terrorist organization, which is a real thing that has legal effect. There is a way to financially designate a group or an individual as, you know, having this kind of relationship to a foreign terrorist organization or an FTO. So, but there's no, legal mechanism for designating a domestic terrorist group. That's not a thing. So this is a place where the government could simply dispense with the law, but I do not think this is a place where the government can use the law to create a category of domestic terrorist organizations. And just to explain FTOs a little bit, there is a category of organization that are designated by the state department as, quote, foreign terrorist organizations. FTOs are designated by the state

Starting point is 03:05:22 department and they are listed on the state department website, right? It's not a secret who they are. You're not going to suddenly find out that, you know, you gave money to, I don't know, the Greek equivalent of the ACLU and now it's, you know, it turns out it's an FTO. There are certainly cases where the government has successfully claimed that a connection between a a domestic group and an FDO exists, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And if you have a connection to an FTO, you can be prosecuted for what's called material support for terrorism. And it's a very serious charge. It's a very frightening charge. And it does criminalize a lot of things that most people understand to be protected by the First Amendment, right?

Starting point is 03:06:12 It criminalizes providing things like medical care to certain groups. It criminalizes providing education or legal support to certain groups that are designated foreign terrorist organizations. And frankly, this is the idea that underpins material support for terrorism charges is offensive to many people because it does feel very much incompatible with constitutional norms under the First Amendment. It's an important thing to be aware of, but it would be very surprising to me if the government were able to successfully make broad claims, connecting, quote, Antifa to foreign terrorist organizations. I was when you were saying that, that had me thinking a little bit about the Holy Land Five case. I was trying to remember that example. I guess, like, to belabor this, can we talk about the distinction between domestic terrorist organization, which, is a classification that doesn't exist versus the charge of committing terrorism

Starting point is 03:07:15 because people who get terrorism enhancements at least like the, like Marius Mason, the one example that comes to my mind, right, who was a member of cell that was associated with the Earth Liberation Front. So that person got over two decades in prison based on being convicted of crimes that existed and then getting enhancements

Starting point is 03:07:37 based on the definition that those were terrorists amplifying the amount of time, right? The difference is the difference between criminalizing conduct or defining conduct as being terroristic and criminalizing a group. The First Amendment protects freedom of belief, association, and expression. And that means that however much we might be targeted for our beliefs, associations, and expression. We cannot be prosecuted criminally for anything besides our conduct, our actions. And so there can be terrorist offenses and enhancements for sentencing on the basis of conduct that you are

Starting point is 03:08:26 convicted of if you engage in certain illegal acts and a judge determines that those acts were motivated by desire to do terrorism. that the penalty for engaging in those acts can be enhanced. But you cannot designate a group of a leaf or an expression as being a crime in itself unless there is conduct associated with it. Because we don't criminalize people's identities. I mean, we do criminalize people's identities, but it's supposed to be impermissible to prosecute people for having those satanities.

Starting point is 03:09:09 I guess I've note, as I understand, the terrorism enhancements that the prosecutors are pursuing in the Louis G. Mangione case have been dropped is a thing that I heard. Yes. Which, I mean, at the same time, this is referenced in one of those documents that came in from the White House as being a terroristic act.

Starting point is 03:09:28 So what do the courts know? Okay, thank you for making that distinction more clear. All right. So how might those of us on the left or in justice movements, as you stated it, conceive of the state's view of us? How do we rally support for our identities and positions? What are some good practices understanding, like having had this conversation, the terrain on which we're operating? Absolutely. So I guess what I would say about best practices is understand whether you are at risk.

Starting point is 03:10:02 Even if you're somebody who has not traditionally been at risk, even if you're someone who has lived your whole life believing that the system works and that this particular administration is like an aberration, I would say, look, this administration is preoccupied with the funding streams for very mainstream liberal causes. And the fact that it's sort of lumping everything under the banner of Antifa, you know, is probably a big surprise for some of these groups like, you know, suburban white moms against guns or whatever. But they are very focused on things like wire fraud and money laundering and stripping nonprofits of their tax status if there's even a whisper of the possibility that those nonprofits are pursuing goals that are in any way antagonistic to state interests. So if you are in a group that has a bank account or raises money, the best practices here haven't changed. Keep very precise track of your funds. If you raise money, use it for the thing you said you were going to use it for, have an accountant, you know, be very, very careful about your money. And again, the best practices for the rest of us also haven't changed. This is political discourse that reaffirms what we already know about targeted surveillance. And we

Starting point is 03:11:20 have for a long time known how to deal with this. If you are approached by law enforcement, remember that the Fifth Amendment protects your right not to speak to them. You have no obligation to speak to law enforcement. It is a crime to lie to federal agents. And that means that it is safest not to say anything besides, I'm represented by counsel. Please leave your name a number. And my lawyer will call you. There is truly never a compelling reason to speak to federal agents before consulting with an attorney. The NLG anti-recretion hotline can be reached at 212-679-2-8-1-1. You can call to have a free privileged conversation about your rights, risks, and responsibilities, and to be connected with appropriate legal resources in your area. And at the end of the day, we keep ourselves safe by

Starting point is 03:12:13 refusing to submit to this fear, refusing to comply in advance, refusing to second-guess whether we actually have rights. And more importantly, we persist by being confident in the fact that no matter what, our communities are going to rally around and care for each other. I think that would be a great place to tie up. Thank you so much for having this conversation and for the insights that you've shared and for the work that you do, Mo. You're very welcome. It's always a pleasure.

Starting point is 03:12:50 There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entired families have been consumed. You know how waking up from a dream? A familiar place can look completely alien? Get back, everyone.

Starting point is 03:13:17 He's going to next! And if you see the devil, walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him, burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning.

Starting point is 03:13:32 From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

Starting point is 03:13:48 or wherever you get your podcasts. The devil walks in Aberstown. But the humility in knowing that life is this classroom that we should never graduate for is what is going to keep you growing. And that's all that matters. World Mental Health Day is around the corner. And on my podcast, Just Heal with Dr. Jay,

Starting point is 03:14:10 I dive into what it really means to care for your mind, body, and spirit. from breaking generational patterns to building emotional capacity. Healing is a journey and wholeness is the destination. I'm going to walk away feeling very healed and feeling like, yes, I'm going to continue my healing journey and I'm going to get some keys from you.

Starting point is 03:14:36 Listen to Jess Hilbert, Dr. Jay, from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just like great shoes, great books take you places, through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay, and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello

Starting point is 03:15:05 Sunshine and IHeart Podcasts, where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off. Each week, I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile. Listen to bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Books is the official audio book and ebook home for Reese's Book Club. Visit apple.com forward slash Reese Apple Books to find out more. What's up everybody?

Starting point is 03:15:38 This is Snacks from the Tramers Podcast, and we're bringing you the horror every week all October long. Kicking off this month, I'll be bringing you all my great. Greatest fear-inducing horror games from Resident Evil to Silent Hill. Me and Tony bringing back by our team on Left for Dead 2. And we're just going to be going over some of the greats. Also in October, we'll be talking about our favorite horror and Halloween movie and figure out why black people always got to die first.

Starting point is 03:16:02 The Umbro Reliquary invites any and all fooling, brave enough, to peruse its many curiosities. But take heed, all sales are final. Weekly horror side quest written and narrated by yours truly With a full episode read and a commentary special And we will cap it off with horror movie battle royale Jason versus Freddie Michael Myers versus the 80th thing with the little tongue muster October we're doing it Halloween style

Starting point is 03:16:31 Listen to the trapners podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network On the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast Happy Grocktober, everybody. Oh, shut the fuck up. We can't. This is, it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.

Starting point is 03:16:55 I'm Garrison Davis today. I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of September 21st to October 1st. And what a week it was. Yeah. Does not feel like I should. be October, but who cares? I guess the government's shut down right now. So all of the dozens of anarchists around the country are rejoicing, as the Senate has failed to pass a short-term funding bill.

Starting point is 03:17:21 That's right, everyone. We did it. We defeated the state using the power of the state. The state. Many such cases. As the government shut down, Trump is threatening mass layoffs and Republicans are framing this whole shutdown as being caused by Democrats who are trying to defend health care for quote unquote illegals, which isn't real. Undocumented immigrants do not get federal health care. That's not even what the Democrats are fighting for. Would be cool if they were. Would be cool if you're in this country, you could just get health care.

Starting point is 03:17:53 That sounds nice. Wouldn't that be a cool, almost utopian place to live? But that's not what's happening. And the rights confronted with this, but they just do not care. Here's Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, on CNN having a little debate about this. If that counterproposal was enacted, is illegal aliens would be paid for American taxpayers, hard-earned dollars, would be paying for benefits for illegal aliens again. We're not doing that.

Starting point is 03:18:17 But it's against federal law for people who are here illegally to get help care. Yes, and that's why our reforms are so important to enforce all that. But the important thing to remember is what's happening tonight. I didn't see that the Democratic proposal that people who are here illegally should get health care. No, because they don't have the level of specification that we had in our bill. It will unwind that. All those things that the CBO just verified will be reversed. We can't afford to do that.

Starting point is 03:18:35 But you see my point that there's no answer the argument that you're making, right? No, that is a red herring in this debate. So what the Democrats are actually doing right now is they're trying to extend the current, currently enacted federal subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, which keeps millions of people able to access health care. And Democrats are also trying to reverse some of the federal health care cuts, including to Medicaid, which happened under the one big, beautiful bill earlier this year. That is what they're actually fighting for. The White House is

Starting point is 03:19:08 retruthing and retweeting proposals from the Democrats that include health care for aliens, but that's legal aliens. That's like legal, documented residents. And they're framing this as health care for quote unquote illegals. It's a bad faith representation as it always is. People can go all the way back to the episode that I made with Robin Sophie last year about what Trump might do to learn more about the public charge rule and how that pertains to people who are not US citizens. I don't think we really have the time nor is this the place to go over that here. But there is not and there has never been a massive federal free health care plan for undocumented people. In fact, people who are undocumented are not going to see the doctor

Starting point is 03:19:52 right now because of the persistent and untrue rumor that ICE are taking people from hospitals. That is not something I'm aware of ever happening. I do take people who are already in their custody to hospitals and they will wait for those people while those people are treated. That is not the same as entering the hospital and grabbing people based on their immigration status. And I'm aware of several cases where people whose life was genuinely in danger were afraid to go and seek medical attention because they were afraid that they would be targeted for their immigration status. So we'll see how long this government shut down last. The last one started in 2018 lasted 35 days.

Starting point is 03:20:33 If this shutdown still happening next week, I'm sure we will include some details about government services being affected, but this could resolve in a few days, a few hours, or in a few weeks, we do not know. But luckily, not all is depressing and dark in this country. There still is a ray of hope, and that ray of hope is named Jimmy Kimball,

Starting point is 03:20:50 who is thankfully back on the air. I know we've all been watching this, certainly. And Next, Star and Sinclair have ceased pre-empting his show that's back on air across the country. Free speech is hashtag so back in America. Robert, do you want to talk about the Disney Plus boycott? Yes. So we've gotten some data finally on the damage done to Disney as a result of the boycott after they fired Monsieur Kimmel. Suspended. Suspended. Suspended. They were definitely going to fire him. They wanted to fire his ass. They definitely wanted to fire him. And, you know, there was a lot of posting

Starting point is 03:21:28 online about people about people canceling their accounts and people being like wow and it's I always it's always very frustrated to me because like people get very excited and it's impossible to tell in the moment is this actually anything right yes 16,000 people shared

Starting point is 03:21:44 this thing about how the website for Disney was down but that doesn't mean anything other than like someone saw the website down and a bunch of people shared and posted it so it was very difficult to tell like is there actually any follow-through on this

Starting point is 03:21:59 is Disney's bottom line being hurt and thankfully I'm very happy to say that it does look like Disney suffered a substantial financial setback as a result of the boycott campaign. Something like 1.7 million paid subscribers canceled and this

Starting point is 03:22:15 was immediately before Disney was looking to announce a price increase so like this is this is like a serious I'm not surprised they reversed course this is like damaging to them. We're not talking about the amount of money that a company like Disney would just ignore. Yeah, and I think the most important thing here for all of us,

Starting point is 03:22:33 and this is something I talked about, we did an episode about this. This is actually before Kimmel had been reinstated by Sinclair, but one of the really important things here is that everyone fucking hates this government. Yeah. They are hideously unpopular. All of their sort of legitimization stuff,

Starting point is 03:22:52 all of the sort of media complicity they've bought, has bought them about 4% approval rating bump from where they were this time of the administration the first time, so he's at about a 41% approval rating. Everything that he's doing is hideously underwater, like his most popular thing is his immigration policy, which is horrible, but it's again 42%. Everyone hates these people.

Starting point is 03:23:11 Yeah. You know, and it's very easy because of their control of the media sphere to believe that they have this sort of total hegemonic power over everyone in the U.S. until the exact moment where it gets challenged and then everyone's like, wait, hold on, no, it turns out most of the country hates this, does not want, Jimmy Kimmel

Starting point is 03:23:28 acts from Disney Comrade Kimmel has joined the fight Yeah Yeah there are more of us And there are of them And there always have been And by more of us

Starting point is 03:23:37 Mia is referring to herself And Jimmy Kimmel As a coherent political class Just for the record there Oh no The only two members Of a coherent political class Meekyll isn't

Starting point is 03:23:47 But that's good news Just overall The fourth estate Which holds Mia The third way And Jimmy Kimmel And that's it The worst day of my life

Starting point is 03:23:56 entirety of the fourth estate. But I don't know, there's a little bit of good news for you. A bunch of people got really pissed at something blatantly anti-First Amendment, anti-democratic, massive overreach of the state, thought crime nonsense. And the company suffered such dramatic within like literally in the space of a week. That's 330 million or so million dollars a year that Disney lost. That even Disney can't ignore that kind of money. A whole bunch of like regular people.

Starting point is 03:24:23 Yeah, yeah. Like people who subscribe to Disney Bluffs. An army of ordinary liberals, the actual, like, silent majority in this country said, no, Disney. We're like, well, that's gross and scary. I'm not paying Disney anymore. And it's good that they did that. Currently, the rights trying to manufacture counter-boycott against Netflix for having children's shows with non-binary characters, mostly using clips from children's shows that are like two or three years old. Clips that Libs of Tok Tok has already posted years ago. Now, Try a Right Check and others are recirculating these clips. to be like, look at how Netflix has gone too far as pushing woke nonsense down the throats of your children by using like ancient clips from like the Jurassic Park TV show. Like, okay, guys, good luck with that. Have fun. Yeah. In other news, the Department of War. This actually happened

Starting point is 03:25:16 last month. On September 5th, Trump signed an executive order approving the name, the Department of War as a secondary title for the Department of Defense to use an official correspondence, public communications, ceremonial context, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch, while the administration also works on changing the name officially through Congress.

Starting point is 03:25:38 Heg Seth nearly immediately switched all of his accounts and his office nameplate to read Secretary of War. Yeah, you know he pushed hard for this one. Defense.gov now redirects to war.gov and they're just referring to this

Starting point is 03:25:55 in all public appearances as the war department. Something that we've talked about on the show before of them wanting to do, and they're going to continue to push this and using this kind of war framing for domestic operations. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:26:08 Not just international deployments. This was its historical name, right? Like way before it was a DOD. Yeah, yeah. It was just to be clear for people. That doesn't mean that it's like a good reason to change it back. Trump-truthed last week.

Starting point is 03:26:26 Quote, at the request of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Christy Knoem, I'm directing Secretary of War Pete Hagseth to provide all necessary troops to protect war-ravaged Portland and any of our ice facilities under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists. I'm also authorizing full force, if necessary. Thank you for your attention in this matter. War-ravaged Portland.

Starting point is 03:26:50 How's it hanging out there for? for our Portland correspondence. It's fine. It's kind of rainy. I had a nice tapas dinner on Sunday. It was pretty good. The crows are really nice. Does someone want to mention

Starting point is 03:27:01 the nature of the anti-ice protests happening in like one square block in like the south waterfront of downtown Portland? Yeah, it's in the south water front. McAdam is what people here call it, the neighborhood where the ice auxiliary facility is. And there have been protests

Starting point is 03:27:18 off and on pretty much since Trump took office. usually on like a good night you get maybe 150, 200 people. There were some nights kind of around where things blew up in L.A. that there were more like five or six hundred people out for a couple of days. There really hasn't been any of the, like what we were seeing in 2020 in terms of like the mass mass gatherings. And, you know, there has not really been much in the way of like people getting arrested or generally getting arrested for crossing a line that separates federal property from like state property, so to speak. And like step over it. and then a bunch of guys run out and grab them, right?

Starting point is 03:27:52 That's mostly what the arrests are for. A lot of people have had charges dropped. I mean, people get fucked up charges when they get charged, but a lot of them are not really sticking because they're not very strong, like, because it's just not much going on, right? Yeah. We'll talk more about why Trump thinks

Starting point is 03:28:09 there's this apocalypse now scenario happening in Portland. But, yeah, so far the protests have been relatively mild. Yes. Yeah, the vibe is very much like the classic Portland thing of people with, like, holding donuts on fishing lines out in front of the cops, right? It's like that, not like Molotovs. The response has been crazy. Like, there's a video going around that's a bunch of federal agents, I think they're

Starting point is 03:28:31 FPS, rolling in up from a van from outside of the ICE facility and arresting somebody who, again, probably crossed a line or through something. Generally is why people have been getting arrested. So that the response has been nonsense. That video is from recently, and I'm seeing it attributed to Trump's declaration of war. but like I saw stuff like that three months ago, four months ago. Like it's been happening every day. Like they do roll up in their vans when they, because they periodically throughout the day

Starting point is 03:28:57 we'll have feds come in to go grab a couple of people and this is a thing they've been doing. So they've been, it's so far at least, I have not seen either an escalation on the ground really in terms of like what protests, what the protests are doing and the numbers of protesters since Trump's declaration. And I also really haven't seen an escalation in what's being deployed. on the ground. We have not seen the Oregon National Guard presence that is being promised. No. This has just been DHS officers. I can confirm, just based on some some information that's come my way, that there do seem to be an increased number of DHS Blackhawks flying with their

Starting point is 03:29:36 transponders off. There's a couple of reasons they can do that. Some of them is for if they are transporting like high value, quote unquote, deportees, right? People who are being deported for some sort of serious crime. Some of it is if they are, feel like they are under threat and are doing like emergency personnel transfers. They're not generally supposed to fly without their transponders, although again, you can't really trust anything to work the way it's supposed to work. But there is some evidence that they have been ramping up and they have been flying more

Starting point is 03:30:06 MQ9s over the city, Reaper drones for surveillance purposes. So that I can say, there does seem to have been a degree of escalation. But in terms of we're not seeing troops marching through the city yet. And I honestly can't. It doesn't seem to me as of the moment that we're recording this, that there has been an escalation in the level of force used on the ground, right? Now, that said, the level of force used on the ground before Trump declared his war on Portland or whatever was still pretty extreme. That has continued. I just, it doesn't seem like what's happening right now is a massive increase over where we were two weeks ago.

Starting point is 03:30:40 Yeah. You know, that's all I'm saying. And I think the place where that has happened is Chicago and we will get to that later. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Trump has continued to talk about deploying, quote-unquote, troops to U.S. cities, including at a meeting of top brass on Tuesday, September 30th, where Pete Hagseth basically ranted to top generals and admirals about no more wokeness in the military. But Trump also spoke, telling top military officials to prepare to deploy military to liberal-run cities, calling it a, quote, war from within. in. Let's play the clip.

Starting point is 03:31:18 But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places. And we're going to straighten them out. It'll be a major part for some of the people in this room.

Starting point is 03:31:34 That's a war, too. It's a war from within controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can't let these people in. The two separate issues, that he conflated, right, protests in cities and people crossing the border. Yeah, and that's the way Trump's been talking about this for a while. I mean, same thing

Starting point is 03:31:55 with, like, D.C., right? Combining this, like, crime issue with undocumented immigration and also with protests against ICE operations, targeting undocumented immigrants, all kind of bundled together into this, into this war from within. Yeah. I mean, the immigration issue, right, is one that gives him a much broader leeway in the powers constitutionally available to him as the executive than policing with the military, which is on the face of a thing that shouldn't happen in the United States. It makes sense from a tactical perspective

Starting point is 03:32:28 for them to conflate those two things together, I will say, even if it's not particularly real. During this televised meeting, Trump told military leaders, quote, last month I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room

Starting point is 03:32:49 talking to the generals because it's the enemy from within and we will have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won't get out of control once you're involved, unquote. So they're directly addressing admirals and generals

Starting point is 03:33:06 about them having to help form a quick reaction force to quell civil disturbance which won't get out of control once they're involved, calling it, again, the enemy from within, a line that Trump used a lot during the tail end of his presidential campaign in 2024. Yeah. Which is just, it's every single element of it is just fascist. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty blanket authoritarian stuff. Like, there's no, like, sugar-coding it here. No, yeah. Yeah. They don't need to, like,

Starting point is 03:33:30 use coded phrases, right? They just say this stuff. Yeah, no, they're just, yeah, they're just, this is just fascism. Like, they're just trying to do it. Yeah, they're just saying the thing. In the meeting, he explicitly labeled these, quote, quote, dangerous cities. as a training ground for our military national guard. But I want to salute every service member who has helped us carry out this critical mission. It's really a very important mission. And I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities

Starting point is 03:33:55 as training grounds for our military, national guard, but military. Because we're going into Chicago version. That's a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor. I think it's worth noting both the mayor of Chicago and the governor Pritzker have been very unhappy about this like as much as

Starting point is 03:34:17 Pritzker has kind of not been doing anything about like CPD aiding ice in raids he is absolutely not budging at all about not putting National Guard troops in so if they're very serious about following this through we're going to see some kind

Starting point is 03:34:33 of large-scale confrontation and Pritzker is not the kind of like knock needs Gavin Newsom type governor. Yeah, he's not Gavin Newsom. He's not simply just going to let Trump do this. And yeah, and that's going to be a major source of confrontation,

Starting point is 03:34:52 assuming this specific, like we're going to send the National Guard in to Chicago stuff, like, happens soon. Trump also talked about talking with Tina Kotech, governor of Oregon, about deploying Oregon National Guard and her pushing back against that, but ostensibly acquiescing in some way because there's, been an announcement from the Oregon National Guard that they will be deploying, and people in Oregon probably aren't going to be happy about it. They won't, quote, understand the mission. But during this meeting, Trump did talk about his phone calls with the Oregon governor. Portland Oregon, where it looks like a war zone. And I get a call from the liberal governor,

Starting point is 03:35:30 sir, please don't come in. We don't need you. I said, well, unless they're playing false tapes, this looked like World War II. Your place is burning down. I mean, you must be kidding. Sir, we have it under control. I said, you don't have it under control, Governor. But I'll check it. And I'll call you back. I called it back.

Starting point is 03:35:50 I said, this place is a nightmare. Probably, it's certainly not the biggest, but it's one of the worst. It's brutal. They go after our ICE people who are great patriots and tough job too, but they love it. They love it because they're cleaning up our country. They love it because there's a $50,000 sign-up bonus. well unless they're playing false tapes so the tapes aren't necessarily false but if you're watching fox news 247 what fox news is doing is they're playing a lot of clips not from the year of

Starting point is 03:36:23 our lord 2025 but in fact from 2020 when trump's last federal invasion of portland happened where he deployed bortac which looked much more like a war scene do you know why because of the massive amounts of chemical munitions that bortac like caked downtown Portland in, which made it look very similar to a war scene. So, yeah, those are the clips that are playing nonstop on TV. I've been watching Fox News clips. They're just playing clips of Portland 2020 to make this look like a different situation than what the current on-the-ground situation is, which may have some intense moments, but not nearly the intensity of five years ago, which again was stoked by Trump's own military police force, which was

Starting point is 03:37:09 deployed to the city. So yeah. There's some information that Trump got corrected internally. I don't know that I think that that's going to mean anything. But yeah, six-year-old footage, being used to justify military deployments is about you'd expect. Really? Literally yesterday I saw footage circulating on X the Everything app of someone throwing a Molotov cocktail into a street. Yeah. I remember that Molotov. And I remember that Molotov. I remember that Molotov. I remember that Molotov. I remember that Molotah getting thrown? Half a decade ago. Because it only hit another protester

Starting point is 03:37:43 whose feet got very badly burned. Yes. And that's the type of footage circulating that makes it look like, you know, once again, Portland's burning down. Portland's always burning down using like one or two select clips from, yeah, half a decade ago.

Starting point is 03:37:55 And again, no buildings actually burnt down. Yeah, they've created a reality around what happened in Portland in 2020 that you will never change with facts or evidence, right? Like, to people who watch Fox News, Portland was burned to the ground in 2020. And again, even on the worst nights in Portland, we could go three blocks and get food from a food cart. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:38:17 We got a lot of great Chinese food that summer. We got great Chinese food, Schwarma, you know? Yep. In L.A., when the city was, whatever, under siege, I went to Buffalo Wild Wings and pretty, pretty normal Buffalo Wild Wings at 2am on a Wednesday scene. That's a war zone. That's a war zone. I had my plate carrier on. I was ready to go.

Starting point is 03:38:37 Here's some ads. We'll be back to talk about Chicago. Yay. But enjoy these possibly Buffalo Wildwing sponsored ads. I doubt it. No vegan food. All right. All right. It's good to be back.

Starting point is 03:39:02 I want to talk very briefly about. Pete Hegsess, Sec War, as he is calling himself now, right? And the little speech he gave. Pete Pegseth. He's working on his physical fitness, for sure, his bod there. He put a big emphasis on physical fitness in his speech, along with grooming standards and other shit. Male standards. Yes, everybody has to attain the male standard for the various role of their combat roles.

Starting point is 03:39:30 If they want to do that, right, so that would mean, you know, the Army physical fitness. test, right, whatever the male standard, quote unquote, was, would be everyone's standard. I don't want to go deep into Heggseth career. That would be another episode, possibly of another show. But I do want to talk about the stuff. Did you notice he said no more, he lifted a number of generals, but one of them was Millie, right? He said no more Millie's Chiarelli, and I forget who the other one was. But I thought that was interesting, given what we saw Trump say about a QRF, right? Millie had a long career in a military, right? He saw plenty of combat and all that stuff, but I think he's most well known to most people for his cooling effect on the use

Starting point is 03:40:10 of the U.S. military against protesters in 2020, I'll say. I think that is what that was referring to, right? That Higgs S was talking about removing that kind of person from command. And Millie also said no to Trump when he wanted to deploy. And he was also working behind the scenes. He's admitted now with Pelosi being like, we need to have a plan if he tries to use the nukes after the election. Yeah, Millie was doing everything he could to mitigate what he saw as a massive danger of Trump responding in a completely disproportionate way. A legitimate national security danger, yeah. Yes. Yeah, like, yeah, someone whose, whose job is protecting the United States, like, that's a reasonable concern, was a reasonable concern at that time. Obviously,

Starting point is 03:40:56 the Trump administration does not want people like that in command anymore. And that was something that Higgs S spoke about at length. The rest of his speech focused on shit like fitness standards, shit like grooming, visible tattoos, a bunch of stuff that you would expect from a mid-career infantry officer who hasn't had a particularly distinguished career, right? Like, that's the shit that mid-career infantry officers do. I think you mean war fighters, James,

Starting point is 03:41:24 which is Higgs' preferred term for soldiers. Yes. Fuck me. Yeah. Well, because it's gender neutral. that. They've been doing that for a while, but... Yeah, it's on the MREs. It's been on the MREs for a while, but, yes, Hanks'Feth does like the phrase, war fighters.

Starting point is 03:41:41 Yeah, his stuff was, like I said, not something you would expect from someone who I think he was an 04 in the national card, right? I don't think any of that is particularly new. He issued a number of directives. One thing I did want to talk about was this change in grooming standards. So the War Department has issued. issued a new directive on shaving profiles. What this does in practice, as we can see from their announcement, which features prominently a black soldier shaving, is it takes away long-term

Starting point is 03:42:16 shaving profiles for soldiers with medical conditions such as pseudopholiculitis or eczema or other soldiers who experience skin irritation by shaving. Previously, those soldiers may have had a, like a waiver, which they could show to their officers, to their officers said, hey, soldier, why haven't you shave, soldier, sailor, airman, space force guardian, whatever, right? Why haven't you shaved? They could say, well, I'm on the shaving profile because of this condition that I have. Now you will only have a year and then you will have to somehow rectify that condition.

Starting point is 03:42:53 They talk about treatments a little bit and so now that's what you can read if you want. I'm not going to read them out for you, but this will very clearly. target black service people the most, and I don't think that's a coincidence, and as we see from the picture of the black soldier shaving in the release that they sent out there, this is happening at the same time as the rest of the stuff, right? And at the same time as we've seen trans folks removed from the military as Hague Fest seems to be going pretty hard on removing women from combat roles. He's previously been more outright in that. This time he's In his speech, he was talking about how women, if they could meet the same standards as men,

Starting point is 03:43:32 would be welcoming combat roles, but they wouldn't quote, unquote, lower the standards. The whole thing was pretty remarkable to see Hegg-Thirth lecturing, you know, people who have spent collectively maybe hundreds of years in combat. Really? People who spent decades losing wars. Yeah, yeah. Decades of cumulative time. Yeah, yeah. I mean, centuries between them, right? but explaining how warfare works to people who have vastly more experience in it than him.

Starting point is 03:44:02 Yes. And basically telling them, it's not a myth that we haven't seen from fascist states before, right? The soldiers were fine, but they were betrayed by the politicians and the generals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is nothing new, but it was still kind of remarkable to see Hegther delivering it to the generals. And specifically, both Hegwick and Trump made statements about if the generals and animals did not like what Trump and Hexon were saying. they should just resign. They should just leave.

Starting point is 03:44:29 I've never walked into a room so silent before. This is very, don't laugh. Don't laugh. Don't laugh. You know what? Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don't like what I'm saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank.

Starting point is 03:44:47 There goes your future. But you just feel nice and loose, okay, because we're all on the same team. part of this is because Trump just wants more loyalists in the upper grass of the military. That's part of this process. That's why he doesn't want millies. He doesn't want people that will deny him. He wants just a complete

Starting point is 03:45:07 loyalist government, and that includes the military. Yeah. And if that means that we're going to have a whole bunch of generals and admirals resign because of Hague Seth and Trump's anti-woke ranting, then that's a desirable outcome for the administration at this point. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:45:23 Speaking of war, Chicago Yeah, I mean the scenes that I have seen the most frequently described as war or looking like a war this week have come out of Chicago

Starting point is 03:45:38 where on Tuesday the 30th there was one of the most brutal raids that we've seen from the feds yet in any city. This took place in South Shore which is a 90% black neighborhood in the south side of Chicago where a whole bunch of

Starting point is 03:45:55 of immigrants who, I don't know if people remember when Texas and a bunch of other states in the south started busing immigrants up to cities in the north. Chicago is one of the ones where that happened a lot. A lot of these people ended up in South Shore, and there was a massive raid on an apartment complex in the South Shore. Agent showed up in a combination of moving vans, sort of unmarked vans, and armored vehicles. It's still unclear exactly how many people were taken We so don't know. Estimates at the time suggested about 40. It's very unclear.

Starting point is 03:46:31 What we do know about the raid was that it was absolutely brutal. A bunch of the initial reports thought that they had been shooting, but there hadn't been shooting. What there had been was that they blew into this apartment complex with flashbang grenades. Yeah. Pretty common for people to mistake those two. Yeah. And these are just regular people who suddenly at one in the morning

Starting point is 03:46:52 a bunch of explosions start going off. there's a whole bunch of pictures that you can see in various articles about this of doors torn off their hinges the agents did a

Starting point is 03:47:01 I mean this is a classic Chicago police tactic but you know they just went through and just started grabbing everyone's stuff and tearing through it and throwing it onto the ground

Starting point is 03:47:10 there were black cop helicopters like constantly circling this just random apartment complex there was a massive FBI presence alongside Border Patrol and ICE

Starting point is 03:47:23 Yeah. It's also worth mentioning that independent outlet book club Chicago, which is one of the very sort of prominent independent local media outlets there obtained a picture from a neighbor who was like next to the raid that show Chicago Police Department on the scene, which they are expressly forbidden like by state law from assisting an immigration enforcement. It is worth reading this article in order to see this quote, quote, we did not participate in or assist with any immigration enforcement spokesperson. Maggie Hion said in a statement, followed immediately by pictures that clearly show a CPD car on the scene of this raid. Yeah, this raid is a really significant escalation of force in a sea that has, I mean, I was already seen ice literally shoot someone and kill them.

Starting point is 03:48:11 But, yeah, I'm going to quote this from Tribe, which is another independent news outlet in collaboration with unraveled press. Veronica Castro of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights at a press conference, said, quote, this looked like hundreds of mass agents knocking down doors and dragging families out in the middle of the night, holding babies that were unclothed, Castro added. So they're dragging people from their homes in the middle of the night, holding naked babies

Starting point is 03:48:39 because people haven't had time, like they're not giving people time to, like, even put clothes on, something you see a lot in the accounts of this. I'm going to read some more from an account from ABC. As I got to my unit to stick my key in the door, I was grabbed by an officer And I said, what's going on? What's going on? He never actually told me. He said I was being detained, said Alicia Brooks. Neighbors like Ebony Watson say they ducked for covers. They heard several flashbangs. They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there when I seen the little girl coming around the corner because they was bringing the kids down too. Had them zip tied to each other, Watson said. That's all I kept asking. What is the

Starting point is 03:49:21 morality. Where is the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right there. He said fuck him kids. So that is what these raids are looking like now. It is again also worth noting that like this is this is a very significant escalation of force. They are zip tying children to each other as they dragged them from their homes at one in the morning and saying fuck him kids. Yeah and this also marks what seems to be a pretty large pivot away from the areas they had been targeting before, which stand to be the suburbs and the outlying areas and into very, very majority, the majority black parts of Chicago. And we're going to talk more about this next week with journalists who's been on the ground. Yeah, I mean, for example, a couple of hours

Starting point is 03:50:05 before we recorded this episode. So there are sparse details, but there is a video that shows the feds just two hands on neck choking a black man in East Garfield Park. It's deeply unclear why this is happening, but they are just doing this now. And what we have so far, we don't know why they were doing this, but this is also one thing I think is very alarming. This is also reported by Tribe. There's a video from the scene where an agent is recorded saying, just so you guys know, this is not an immigration enforcement action. The agent goes on to say they were responding to a robbery in progress. All we know about is there was a car crash, and they just started choking this guy. It's unclear

Starting point is 03:50:51 exactly what's going on with this. There probably will be more details by the time this episode is going out but the feds are just doing this stuff every day in Chicago. I mean, just randomly choking black people on the street and this massive, hideous

Starting point is 03:51:07 right in South Shore are pretty significant escalations. In places they haven't been targeting before and it's hard to see this ending anytime soon or their, you know, things getting any better from here, especially with the sort of, you know, as we're mentioning earlier, there hasn't been really any sign of like an intensification of federal violence in Portland,

Starting point is 03:51:28 but in Chicago, there absolutely has been. And it's horrible. Yeah, so talking of intensification of federal activity, I guess. According to a notice posted in the Federal Register, DHS is going to use the cultural, environmental, and historical protection waiver that we reported about that came out this spring to force through wall construction in the San Diego sector. I am guessing that in part we will see this used to waive. One of the acts it is waives, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. And I'm guessing

Starting point is 03:52:10 in part that this will be used to waive that, right? Because Kumai ancestors are in these areas. And at the end, the tell end of the previous Trump administration, I reported on this for Sierra, which is a magazine of the Sierra Club. Kumiye people were using ceremony. So they were participating in ceremony every day at construction sites in order to slow down the clock. And they also filed a lawsuit, right? But they were trying to basically run out the clock on the Trump administration in 2020. They successfully in some areas, prevented some construction, but with the waiver of NAGPRA, it's hard to see how they will be able to do that. They also waive a bunch of other acts, the Eagle Protection Act, Environmental and Migrant Fruit Bird Treaties, a bunch of other acts, right?

Starting point is 03:53:01 This comes on the same week as Secretary of War, Pete Head Thess, restored medals of honor to soldiers at Wounded Knee. If people are not familiar, this is not the episode where I do a history of things that have happened at Wounded Knee, but this was the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. This was just a slaughter. Yeah, hundreds of unarmed Lakota's civilians were murdered by the United States military. This wasn't a battle. This was just a massacre. There were significant casualties for the U.S. military. Most of them were caused by the U.S. military, i.e. friendly fire and a completely disorganized

Starting point is 03:53:36 slaughter of civilians. There was a standoff at Wundedly later in the 1970s in which two indigenous people died, one went missing. you can read Mary Bravebird's book about that if you want a first-hand account of that, it's a very good book. But, yeah, Hegseth is doing this, I think, because Lloyd Austin had previously ordered a review of those medals because they weren't fighting.

Starting point is 03:53:59 They were just killing people. Therefore, it makes sense to strip these medals of honor and that there was very little honor in what they did. Hegsef has restored those. Very amusingly, he said this is final. Like another sec-deaf couldn't just order a review like in four years and change it again. CBP has also issued a request for comments here in San Diego

Starting point is 03:54:20 about its plans to build 7.6 miles of wall west of Tecate as well as 1.3 miles of wall east of Tecate, more secondary barrier east of Otai-Mesa, and install or maintain 51 miles of, quote, barrier system attributes, which may include fiber optic cables, lighting poles, artificial lights, power cables, surveillance cameras, access and patrol roads, and utility shelters. What this would do,

Starting point is 03:54:48 I think most people who haven't spent time at the border are not aware that there are vast gaps in the border wall, right? And this would close some of those. There are still gaps east of this area. When a lot of people were entering in 2023, they were coming east of here in a more mountainous area, but this will close existing gaps in the wall around Takata, they were in Marron Valley. I imagine that after that, they will continue to move east. The areas where there are gaps, some of the areas where there are gaps for the reason aren't that hard to access. Some of them would be very hard to access with construction machinery, and therefore they'd have to spend a long time building a road before they could even begin

Starting point is 03:55:28 building the wall. Reuters has conducted a review of more than two million court records and concluded that federal prosecution of drug cases, especially those of high-profile traffickers, have dropped to the lowest level in decades. Fell for it again, a word. Yeah, I mean, normally you would see things like racketeering, money laundering, conspiracy charges, right? But these are down 24% compared to last year.

Starting point is 03:55:56 Even ongoing investigations have stalled as a federal law enforcement apparatus is focusing the vast majority of its people on deporting people who have not been. accused of any crime. I mean, yeah, even just like the regular FBI investigative capacity, it's been shifted to large extent towards just immigration enforcement. So they're not, they're actually just not going after as much, like, actual crime.

Starting point is 03:56:19 Yeah, I think some agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms, and Explosive, for example, I think have the majority of their agents. Tasks to immigration raids right now, the FBI. One agent described where he had been tasked with as, quote, photo op bull shit, which was taking photos of their teams on and before raids for use by the ATF and the White House in social media posts. So they do appear to have lost the support of even some federal law enforcement. Talking of federal law enforcement, we have also learned this week about an FBI operation during the Biden administration, during which Tom Homan allegedly

Starting point is 03:56:59 accepted $50,000 in cash. What? You didn't hear about the Tom Homan baggage? Oh, gosh, catch that scares me. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. What a joy to be able to share this with you, Gerrison. No, this is going to get better. Just, just keep it, keep simmer down. It was in a bag.

Starting point is 03:57:17 Simmer down. Simmer down. Simmer down. So, Tom Homan, for those who are not familiar, is Trump's border czar, and a longtime border security official dating back to the Biden administration. Let's find out about how they got on to Tom Homan. No, no, no, no. You just said that there was $50,000 in Canada.

Starting point is 03:57:35 But for what? Just wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Another Obama-era ice staffer, Julian Calderas, who undercover agents had contacted as part of a separate investigation, repeatedly suggested to the agents that they may wish to bribe Holman in order to obtain government contracts. Calderas repeatedly suggested this to the undercover agents so much so that they diverted their investigation

Starting point is 03:58:02 and set up this investigation. They gave home. the money but waited to see what he would do in office in order to see, I guess they felt they would have a stronger case if he came back to them and said, you know, I have these five federal contracts, which one would you like? The Trump DOJ took no further steps to investigate and has closed the investigation according to NBC. The Trump administration is claiming this was a setup by the FBI, but of course the investigation occurred in September of 24, so before the election. Again, it was not an investigation that they started.

Starting point is 03:58:35 It bribed off because Calderas repeatedly suggested that they should continue to, they should try and bribe Homer. The agents who did this operation were posing his businessman trying to get government contracts, right? Okay. This might explain. So, Homan was a big-time Trump affiliate, right? Big-time Trump supporter. People were suggesting that he might be made Secretary of Homeland Security. This might be why.

Starting point is 03:59:03 We'll never know for sure, right? this might explain why he's been given this slightly less formal role, which I don't believe he has to pass through Congress, which is, quote, unquote, borders czar. This is, like, the level of normalized corruption. It's so good. Which exists in every level of this administration. It's so funny.

Starting point is 03:59:21 Remember when they just could not stop talking about Hunter Biden? It's like all the time. And meanwhile, you have, like, you know, all of like Jared Kushner's dealings with, like, Qatar and the Saudis, Tom Homan, getting $50,000 in cash from, like, undercover agents posing us businessmen to help obtain, like, government contracts.

Starting point is 03:59:42 It's like an absurd, comical, cartoon world. So it's Keystone cop shit. We don't know if he's given the cash back. Oh, he, no. That cash is long, God. So much cocaine. Like, I could either confirm or deny it was spent on cocaine.

Starting point is 03:59:59 Yeah, a wild incident for corruption. Oh, God. Finally, I want to talk about Venezuela. In Venezuela, it seems that Stephen Miller has been taking the lead on strikes on alleged drug smugglers. According to a Guardian piece, the strikes had been authorized by the Homeland Security Council. Sure. That's a body that Miller leaves, which has massively grown in influence since the Trump administration. It seems like most people in the administration were pretty much kept in the dark about this until very shortly before the strikes took place. they were justified under the Article 2 powers,

Starting point is 04:00:33 which give the President authority to use force and limited self-defense engagements. But it seems like Miller is pardoned upon driving the ship on this increased violence that we're seeing against Venezuela. All right, we are back. For our final story, this episode, we're going to talk about the national security presidential memorandums number seven, titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, which was signed by President Donald Trump on Thursday, September 25th. This relates in many ways to the Antifa Domestic Terrorism Executive Order from last week. But this memo is a lot more clear in outlining actual policy changes that will affect law enforcement investigations.

Starting point is 04:01:35 So let's go over the four sections of this very, very long memo. I've tried to condense it down as much as possible. But there is some good information in here to know. Section 1 asserts that there's been an increase in political violence in recent years with assassinations, and quote-unquote riots in Los Angeles in Portland, which have resulted in a more than 1,000 percent increase in attacks against ICE officers since Trump's inauguration 2.0. The memo states that riots and violence aren't organic events or isolated incidents,

Starting point is 04:02:05 but in fact, quote, a culmination of a sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence, opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society, unquote. We've spoken about the statistic about attacks on ICE officers before and how that's very misleading. Yeah, I mean, an ICE officer is attacked when an ICE officer's fist encounters the face of a child.

Starting point is 04:02:36 Yeah, a Latino grandmother. Yes. Latina grandmother in that case. Well, and a lot of this talking about, you know, riots as not organized events or incident incidents, What they describe here is this like a culmination of the sophisticated campaign. This is just describing like the process of like what protesting is, right? Trying to direct or change policy outcomes, which it comes up a lot in these like domestic

Starting point is 04:03:00 terrorism laws, which when overapplied to just nonviolent acts of speech, just start infringing upon very standard First Amendment activity. It's one of the five fundamental freedoms of the First Amendment, right? The right to assemble. The right was several of them. Actually, the right to assemble, the right to speak, the right to petition the government. Like, these are fundamental. The right to Twitch stream at a riot as a free member of the press.

Starting point is 04:03:21 Yeah, definitely. That's not a right that I choose to exercise, but I guess it is one that exists. But you and I have, you were in Portland and I was in Los Angeles. Like, the idea that these cities were fundamentally, like, damaged by these protests. It's just not true. Well, and they're not just talking about damage from riots. They're also talking about, you know, effects on individual citizens. This memo describes how these, you know, organized campaigns start by, quote,

Starting point is 04:03:46 isolating and dehumanizing specific targets to justify murder or other violent action. Unquote. Claiming that this process happens across, quote, anonymous chat forums, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions. These campaigns then escalate to organize doxing with the explicit intent of encouraging others to harass, intimidate, or violently assault targets, unquote. I mean, this is what the right has done to, like, the expression, especially migrants and trans people, right, for a very long time. Anonymous chat forums, do they mean Reddit? Reddit, telegram, maybe.

Starting point is 04:04:26 Yeah. I know that some subreddits have been closed since the issuing of this memorandum, which I'm wondering if it is related. Not explicitly, but like I think this memos would be in this section, like referring to things akin to Ice Watch. Okay, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. As well as, you know, standard, like, you know, anti-faceted action against, like, legitimate neo-Nazis, which... Yeah.

Starting point is 04:04:53 The right is not against a doxing as a practice, as we have seen the past few weeks with the state-sponsored, organized doxing harassment campaigns against people for their comments about the death of Charlie Kirk. Yeah. The memo goes on to list a collection of, quote, common recurrent motivations and Indica, or indicators, that unite this pattern of violence and terroristic activities. under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism. These movements portray foundational American principles, support for law enforcement and border control, as fascist to justify and encourage acts of a violent revolution. Common threats animating this violent conduct include

Starting point is 04:05:33 anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality, unquote. So insofar as this memo has been reported, it's mostly been on this specific section here, listing the indicators that could be driving terroristic acts under the umbrella of anti-fascism, including all of these beliefs that people are allowed to hold in the United States due to the rights granted to us and the Bill

Starting point is 04:06:10 of Rights and the Constitution. Yeah, I mean, the hypocrisy is the point, and it's sometimes not worth, oh, it's not a point, but it's not particularly, you know, it doesn't change anything I think I'm pointing out, but I will just point out that, like, the idea that border control is a foundational American principle, it's not true, that it was not until the Chinese Exclusion Act, that the United States began to exclude anyone from coming here, and that was in the 19th century. History understanders will have noticed that the United States began at some point before the 19th century. One thing I will say regarding like this section, some reporting around this memo is framing things like, you know, anti-capitalism or anti-Christianity is now that is

Starting point is 04:06:50 going to be used as evidence that you are a terrorist. That is not the explicit way is written about in this memo. These are indicators, which if some investigator sees on a Twitter account or a blue sky account, could then cause them to investigate further into this person or group. But it's not like just expressing these things will itself deem you a terrorist and be putting you in jail. This does rely on action. Now, the memo does go on to talk about trying to prevent crime before it happens. I think this would be more in the way of how the FBI tries to set up like sting operations or catch people who are planning a violent act before they actually do it. Yeah. As we've even seen the past few weeks, with people being arrested for planning retaliation

Starting point is 04:07:37 attacks following the death of Charlie Kirk. This has happened. Yeah. Now, the memo calls for a new national law enforcement strategy to quote, investigate all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts,

Starting point is 04:08:02 unquote. So that is the pre-crime aspect of this order, which they could use some of these beliefs like extremism on migration or race or gender or anti-Americanism has justification to start investigating groups, which then arrests could follow prior to imminent violent act as deemed by federal law enforcement. Yeah, I mean, in theory, the role of especially federal law enforcement

Starting point is 04:08:29 has always been to investigate people who were planning violent or terroristic acts. The difference here is that this is being specifically framed around a certain group. And this probably will lead to more attempts by them, surveillance on people within those groups, right? No, this is very worrying in terms of, like, surveillance, suppressing speech, chilling speech, because what they're qualifying as violent or terroristic acts is just ordinary protest activity, first-member protest activity, non-government organizations that support progressive causes or values, that's the real, like, concern here.

Starting point is 04:09:06 It's worth stating here that in Los Angeles, for example, a number of grand jury did not return indictments of people who were accused of quite serious crimes that the grand jury did not think it was reasonable to indict them for, right? This is unusual. Most federal prosecutions do result ultimately in a guilty plea, right? Because they bring very strong cases when they bring them. But it's worth noting that the specifically, like the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles has not stuck the landing on all of its attempts to indict people for things that they did during

Starting point is 04:09:39 that time of protest in June. In terms of like implementation, the memo says, quote, law enforcement will disband and uproot networks, entities, and organizations that promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society, unquote. Networks, entities, organizations, these refer to like established organizations, like actual, like formed groups that have political activity. Now, section two outlines how the national joint terrorism task force will, quote, unquote, coordinate and supervise a new comprehensive national strategy and orders the local joint terrorism task force around the country to, quote, investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism, conspiracy against rights, or the violent deprivation of any citizen's rights, unquote.

Starting point is 04:10:41 The GDTFs, Joint Terrorism Task Force, will also investigate institutional and individual funders, including employees of organizations, which are, quote, responsible for sponsor or otherwise the aid and abet the principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct as previously described. That's a broad net, right? There's a lot of this stuff in like the Antifa order also alluded to this. Trump's statements made in the Oval Office have alluded to this going after funders, foreign funders. whether that's the groups like the ACLU or like bail funds. They mention George Soros very often. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:11:19 The Open Society Foundation, right? Yeah. I think the right has had a fascination with Soros for a long time, right? They've been looking for a reason to either exclude Soros from participation in U.S. politics. And just to be like, obviously I think most people realize this, but that that fascination is rooted deeply in anti-Semitism. George Soros is a Holocaust survivor. And there has been like an attempt to find reason. to exclude sorrows from U.S. political activity for some time.

Starting point is 04:11:45 I think it's reasonable to see this in that trend. This sort of like big organizations, foreign organizations is also mentioned in this memo and saying the investigation will include NGOs and American citizens with foreign ties that could be in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act or, quote, money laundering by funding, creating, or supporting entities that engage in activities that support or encourage domestic terrorism, unquote. The memo states that the Attorney General shall, issue of guidance, which ensures that domestic terrorism priorities include, quote,

Starting point is 04:12:16 politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, damage of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder. The guide shall also include an identification of any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other Indica common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity. this is a worrying list of things that are not domestic terrorism that they're going to try to claim

Starting point is 04:12:47 our domestic terrorism trespass yeah like trespassing is now domestic terrorism that's not a great thing for the attorney general to be issuing guidance on

Starting point is 04:12:57 yeah civil disorder is a very broad and somewhat nebulous term right like are they going to call the organized doxing campaigns that the right is doing right now domestic terrorism

Starting point is 04:13:09 no of course not right these things are just taking form for explicit, like, political prosecution for the political lens of the Trump administration. I think the goal here, like, some of these, there isn't even a statute, right? Like, I'm not aware of a broad federal doxing statute, aside from, you know, certain specific instances where it might be a crime to reveal someone's address. Violent intimidation of probably, like, federal law enforcement would be one thing that they go after. Yeah, federal law enforcement, people with protective orders, that kind of thing, right?

Starting point is 04:13:39 And, yeah, there are probably ways of doing that. But I think a lot of this is intended to have a chilling effect on speech and organizing. Absolutely. The Treasury Secretary will work with the Attorney General to, quote, identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political activity, and shall deploy investigative tools, examine financial flows, and coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit funding streams, unquote. Again, very obsessed with this idea that there's tons of money that is funding Antifa,

Starting point is 04:14:07 which if you know anyone under the Antifa, you know that they are extremely broke. Yeah, yeah, this is a... Left-wing protesters are not the most financially stable bunch. Yeah. There's not this illicit funding streams. This is a huge, a huge idea that the right has, like, latched on. Ironically, this is something that the right shares with the authoritarian left, actually.

Starting point is 04:14:29 The idea that people can't act independently unless there is a large, well-funded actor motivating them to act is something that, because the authoritarian right and the authoritarian left, agree on some things. And one of them is that, like, people can't take the initiative to act, right? That there has to be some kind of vanguard in the case the authoritarian left or nefarious funder in the case of the authoritarian right. And so this, this lines up with the way that they understand the world. I mean, yeah, and this, I was talking specifically here in terms of, like, regular people on the ground attending protests. There's, like, big, big groups, like, you know, often like, you know, communist-aligned groups that may be receiving funding,

Starting point is 04:15:09 from foreign sources. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for real. But I do not believe that is what this order is, at least this section is actually wanting to go after. That might be what they, in the end, actually end up targeting. They end up sweeping up. Because it's the only thing that actually has, like, you know, foreign funding. But like, you know, Capital A Antifa, teenagers with like umbrellas showing up in front of an ice building are not receiving money from like Iran, China or Russia. Yeah. As you say, it might be large at Southern Poverty Law Center. ACLU, the Open Society Foundation, Bill Gates. Network for strong communities.

Starting point is 04:15:43 Yeah, like some of these organizations might be what they're trying to drag a net over here. Or nonprofits. The next section instructs the IRS to, quote, take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism, unquote, and calls for the IRS to refer suspect organizations and their employees to the Department of Justice

Starting point is 04:16:08 for investigation and possible prosecution. It's probably worth noting the context here that there was, this is after a 20-10 congressional investigation that found out that the IRS had gone after some Tea Party groups, right? Do you remember the Tea Party, Garrison? You were at seven at that time? I remember the Tea Party, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:16:27 So the feeling here, Biden, if you remember, Garrison also hired a number of new IRS agents. There was a conspiracy theory that these were to provide some kind of armed massive armed element to the IRS that was going around in the Biden administration. I'm sure the IRS had an armed element, right? There is not a federal investigative agency that doesn't. Like, the Postal Service has cops and probably a SWAT team. But there was a feeling on the right

Starting point is 04:16:54 that Biden mobilized the IRS against right-wing individuals. And I can see this being the old pendulum swinging back in the other direction a little bit. One of the more interesting sections that I've highlighted of the memo instructs investigators to quote, question and interrogate individuals engaged in political violence or lawlessness regarding the entity or individual organizing such actions and any related financial sponsorship prior to adjudication or initiation of a plea agreement, unquote. That's directing like the interrogations of people arrested at protests. Like, specifically go after who's funding them to be a protest, which I'm sure some very fruitful information will come out of.

Starting point is 04:17:40 Yeah. Referring back to our discussion of, like, you know, the common motivators or Indica, including things, you know, like anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, and how those beliefs in and of themselves, I don't think, will be sufficient for declaring someone a terrorist. And, like, locking them up is because later in this memo, the memo directs investigations to, quote,

Starting point is 04:18:02 prioritize crimes such as the following, assaulting federal officers or employees, conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to commit offense, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, money laundering, funding of terrorist acts, or otherwise facilitating terrorism, arson, violations of the RICO Act, and major fraud against the United States, unquote. So, could the government use these indicators to then find groups to target, to stick some of these crimes onto groups or organizations. Absolutely. That's probably what they're going to do. Yeah. But these are the things to, like, be aware of. And they're going to try to, you know, slap these on, people who are just arrested at protests, people who work for NGOs,

Starting point is 04:18:46 people who work for legal support networks, maybe migrant assistance networks. Like, that's, that's going to be the target for a lot of these things. And we've seen some of these, like, conspiracy charges in San Diego, with their Antifa prosecution case. We've seen similar stuff in Atlanta with Stop Cop City, right? There is precedent for this. We've seen the state try to and to a degree of success and failure actually push these charges forward. Yeah, the panic that those two cases created, I think, and we're still pre, you know, trial in the Atlanta case, right? The trial's in progress. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, pre, I guess, a conclusion of that trial. But the current indication is that most of these RICO charters are not going to stick.

Starting point is 04:19:33 Yes. And most of the conspiracy charges in San Diego did not, right? And most of those people ended up not being convicted of all the things they were accused of. I do see the major fraud against the United States, and I think that's probably going to use against NGOs. I do also wonder they have spoken before about the payroll protection plan and looking at PPP fraud. Yeah. I mean, financial crimes are always really scary, right? Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 04:20:01 Like a lot of nonprofits, you know, like people undoubtedly, given the scale of the PPP, people abused it. I think nonprofits would be a lot more buttoned up than almost anyone else in that regard, especially these big liberal non-profits, but that is an area which I'm sure that the Trump IRS will be looking at. Yeah, and they might even try to slap these on people making jokes. or quote unquote threats online, right? Solicitation to commit a crime of violence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People shouldn't be saying stupid shit on social media right now.

Starting point is 04:20:34 Which is absolutely like a chilling speech, right? That is bad. That is a bad thing, but you don't want to give these people extra ammunition to use against yourself right now. Fighting words are not always like First Amendment speech right now. Now, like I'm no expert in where that starts and where that ends. But yeah, like in terms of not doing stupid things, like this is not a time to do stupid things on your posting website of choice.

Starting point is 04:21:03 Section 2 closes by calling for investigators and federal police to, quote, adopt strategies similar to those used to address violent crime and organized crime to disrupt and dismantle entire networks of criminal activity, unquote. So, yeah, especially with all this financial stuff, money laundering, RICO, conspiracy charges. They're basically using, or they want,

Starting point is 04:21:25 want to use like tactics to take down like organized crime rings, just targeting their political enemies, targeting political organizations and people who attend protests. Like that is, that is the real gist of this memo. Yeah. Section 3 instructs the attorney general to designate qualifying groups or entities under investigation as domestic terrorist organizations per the definition of Domestic Terrorism in 18 U.S.C. 23315, and to submit a list of such groups to the President of the United States. And Section 4 instructs the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to designate the domestic terrorism a national priority area and provide extra funding for law enforcement to, quote, detect, prevent, and protect against threats arising from this area.

Starting point is 04:22:12 That is the bulk of the National Security for Central Memorandum number seven, promising to chill speech and go after political opponents and organizations, entities, and individuals, and employees of organizations. Yeah. Very, very undemocratic, very, very on its face authoritarian. Yeah. You don't even need, like, like, allegations of political targeting. Like, they're writing down how they want to do political targeting.

Starting point is 04:22:38 They're bragging about it. It's really, we'll briefly want to raise the example of the flag burning, right? So Donald Trump signed an executive order ordering the Justice Department to investigate flag burning earlier this year. I can't quite remember when. Subsequently, someone called Jan Carey of North Carolina was arrested after they burned a flag, an American flag, just to be clear, outside the White House. I guess the flag burning executive order doesn't apply to like your, you know, like anime flag or whatever. It's specifically about the flag of the United States. something which, I think Johnson v. Texas is a Supreme Court case, right, but there is a considerable

Starting point is 04:23:21 amount of legal precedent that is First Amendment speech. Carrey was arrested. What is being missed in the discussion is that Kerry was charged with two misdemeanor crimes. One was for lighting a fire, not in a designated area in receptacle. The other was for lighting a fire in a manner that threatened to cause damage to him resulted in the burning of property, real property, and park resources. These are both offenses that you can be incarcerated. or fined for. I want people to know that, right? Like, he was not arrested because of the executive order, although the executive order may very much influence the climate, which led to his arrest and charged with these other things. But he wasn't charged with violating the executive order,

Starting point is 04:24:02 because that is not how it works. They can't change the law with executive orders or presidential memorandums. What they can do is direct how the law will be enforced or policy guidelines, right? And That's what this is affecting right now. All of these branches, like the DHS, Justice Department, federal police, are going to be following the policy guidelines and outlines established in this memo to then try to enforce the laws that we have, some of which they will probably find ways to do it, and sometimes they won't. Yeah, we have a very broad range of statutes criminalizing a very large range of things, and someone will find some way in there to criminalize someone for something that might seem on the face. of it to be not nefarious. But that doesn't mean that we have executive legislative fusion.

Starting point is 04:24:52 We don't write itself too much of the government and that is important to remember too. No laws have been changed criminalizing anti-Americanism, right? Yeah. That is an important thing to keep in mind. That does not mean that this order is not going to chill speech,

Starting point is 04:25:07 suppress free speech, or be used to criminally target people. Yeah. Criminal prosecutions can ruin the lives of people for years and years, regardless of the actual, like, outcome, right? Even if they get off on the charges. And we want to be clear that we're not, like, minimizing the effects of this, but we do want to actually break down what, like, the threat model is specifically for, like,

Starting point is 04:25:28 NGOs, legal organizations that help protesters or migrants, LGBTQ organizations, right? These are probably going to be the first targets of a lot of, like, the conspiracy fraud sections of this order besides, you know, protesters that get rounded up and get put into, into this like political war game that they're playing. Similar to how regular protesters in Atlanta then found themselves suddenly amidst like a three year long RICO domestic terrorism case. Despite not participating in any kind of large,

Starting point is 04:25:59 organized aspect of Stop Cop City. They were just regular attendees. So there'll be stuff similar to that. That happens throughout the next few months to years. And I think that is where we should keep our attention focused on mitigating the harms of government overreact. reach. Yeah. So for the fundraiser this week, something slightly different. I wanted to read off this GoFundMe for the emergency circus. They are traveling south of the US border. I believe

Starting point is 04:26:25 they're going to migrant shelters in Tijuana to hold circus acts, circus performances for kids. I have obviously, not obviously, but I've spent a decent amount of my life in refugee camps and migrant shelters. And they can be pretty hard places for kids. And it's something that I think about almost every day. And so people bringing joy to those children is something that I think is wonderful and very important. People get the impression that like legal funds are important and kids having a laugh is not important. But like children have a right to be children and that's taken away from them by the immigration system. And so I would like if you supported this, the website is www.gofundb.com slash f slash EC-O-O-F-F-I-C-E. It will also be in a show

Starting point is 04:27:12 notes. If you would like to email us, you can do so at our encrypted email address, which is CoolZone Tips at Proton.me. Your email will only be end-to-end encrypted if you send it from an encrypted email address. Proton Mail is an example of an encrypted email address. Before we close the episode, I will tease an episode for next week. There was a shooting at a Mormon church on Sunday, which the right briefly tried to turn into like this culture war narrative on attacks on Christianity. And then once information about the shooter became more clear, they quickly dropped the subject. So on Wednesday, I'll be doing an episode talking about this shooting and a few others and how various outlets on the right and left are only

Starting point is 04:28:01 reporting on these big shootings insofar as they can turn them into political weapons against the opposition party. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. We're listening.

Starting point is 04:28:45 There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. From IHeart podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town. A new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jules State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app,

Starting point is 04:29:10 Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, everybody? It's snacks from the trap nerds and all October long. We're bringing you the horror. Bookety, boogity, boogity. We're kicking off this month with some of my best horror games

Starting point is 04:29:22 to keep you terrified. Then we'll be talking about our favorite horror in Halloween movies and figuring out why black people always die further. And it's the return of Tony's horror show, SideQuest written and narrated by yours truly. We'll also be doing a full episode reading

Starting point is 04:29:35 with commentary. And we'll cap it off with a horror movie battle royale. Open your free, our hard radio app and search trap nurse podcast and listen now in early 1988 federal agents race to track down the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into new york from asia had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it five six white people pushed me in the car i'm going what the hell basically your stay-at-home moms were picking up

Starting point is 04:30:05 these large amounts of heroin all you got to do is receive the package don't have to open it just She was very upset, crying. Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand, and I saw the flash of light. Listen to the Chinatown Sting on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts. I love that you created his system that revolves around you creating pockets of peace. World Mental Health Day is around the corner, and on my podcast, Just Healed with Dr. Jay. I dive into what it really means to care for your mind, body, and spirit. From breaking generational patterns to building emotional capacity.

Starting point is 04:30:44 I'm going to walk away feeling like, yes, I'm going to continue my healing journey. Listen to Jess Hilbert, Dr. Jay, from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.

Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 202

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